TOOL TIME

blogThere are several new and improved tools available that make blogging a bit easier:

Technorati, the tool that tells you how many inbound blogs link to your blog, has now released its beta of its improved version — faster loading, better looking. The old version is no longer spidering for new inbound blogs, so if you want to see where you stand go to the beta page. Technorati also includes the valuable Interesting Recent Blogs list (smaller blogs getting an unusual amount of attention, and why) plus Breaking News (hottests memes in the blogosphere today). They’re not yet moved over to the new beta yet. For status on the changeover and other interesting info on the blogosphere, blogroll Technorati founder David Sifry’s Alerts.

Next up is David Winer’s Share Your OPML, a tool that will answer the question “Who subscribes to my blog’s RSS feed“. It also lists the Top 100 most RSS-subscribed blogs, and How to Save the World briefly made the list, but now I’m hovering just under the cutoff point. Some other cute tools worth exploring as well, like a page showing all the graphics in the Top 100 blogs in the last two days.

Finally, quite a few bloggers are using Bloglines, a “a free service that makes it easy to keep up with your favorite blogs and newsfeeds. With Bloglines, you can subscribe to the RSS feeds of your favorite blogs, and Bloglines will monitor updates to those sites. You can read the latest entries easily within Bloglines”. I haven’t tried it yet, but it looks interesting.

And if you haven’t already discovered Blogstreet, which ranks the Top 500 blogs in different ways, and the Waypath Buzzometer, which tracks how often different words and phrases are appearing in the blogosphere, you owe it to yourself to check them out too.

This entry was posted in Using Weblogs and Technology. Bookmark the permalink.

3 Responses to TOOL TIME

  1. Adrian says:

    Just tried out the Buzzometer — it’s fascinating. Amazing spike for the word “moon”, starting around Jan. 5th. Wonder what caused so many people to be thinking lunar thoughts just then.

  2. Adrian says:

    Damn. Just realized what it must have been; pls. remind me not to comment late at night. Thought it was something a little more transcendent and mysterious.

  3. kara says:

    Thanks for the updates Dave :)

Comments are closed.