ScooptWords blog

Tracking comments

As the number of blogs bantering about ScooptWords starts to pick up, I'm finding Co.mments to be a very handy service with which to track your conversations throughout the web. You can easily set Co.mments up to recieve new comments as an RSS feed. What this means, to RSS newbies, is that you don't have to trawl the web tracking down all those posts you commented on. When new comments are made, you'll know fairly sharpish. Very handy. However, it doesn't track comments on all sites. For example, I can't get it to work with Comment is Free for some reason. Sign up here. You just have to remember to install a bookmarklet in your browser toolbar AND to click it each time you make a comment or come across a conversation you're interested in.

Pimp my Typepad blog

If looks are important, and they are, and you have a Typepad blog, you could do far worse than check out Typepadhacks, a blog by John T. Unger. He caught hold of a need - how can I make my Typepad blog better? - and is blogging tweaks and hackwizardry on a daily basis - much of which is garnered from the masses of blogbrains that gather around his three month old blog.

At ScooptWords we're all about selling blog content, selling words to print publications. What John's doing is quite different, but there is a related point here (honest). In a way, John's selling himself, his brand. He's now a recognised Typepad expert who could (probably) walk into a job at SixApart before the end of this year if he wanted to. Typepad themselves would do well to consider formally incorporating Typepadhacks into the Typepad brand. Or does Typepadhacks have more value to Typepad as a completely separate, independent entity?

The whole idea of 'selling a blog' has yet to catch on, but it will. I know of one blogger who is in talks about selling his two blogs to a mainstream publisher and becoming part of a larger network. It's all part of the same game: making cash from your content, from your brand. And making your blog more functional, more pretty, is another important part of that. Typepadhacks will help you get under the bonnet of your Typepad blog to do the necessary if you're so inclined.

Online journalism tools

Amy Gahran at Poynter has a list of online tools she recommends for media pros,

• Furl: Create your own private, full-text, tagged, searchable, shareable, Web-based archive of anything interesting, relevant, or useful you find online. (10 cool things to do with Furl, About Furl, file sharing, and copyright)
• Del.icio.us: Bill already knew about del.icio.us, but he didn't know you could use it to automatically create a daily digest posting of link items to a Typepad or Movable Type weblog -- which I do for one of my weblogs, The Right Conversation. And here's why I think Furl and Del.icio.us are almost perfect together.
• Audio/video search: Play with Podzinger and Blinkx, and make sure all your multimedia content gets fed to those services. Endless hours of serendipitous fun.
• Tracking online conversations: I'm using Co.mments right now, but once they debug their Firefox extension I expect I'll be back using CoComment.
• Writely: Okay, I don't use this much, but it's a pretty cool collaborative tool -- a web-based word processor. Worth playing around with. I also use Seedwiki to create password-protected wikis for team use on projects I'm involved with.

If you're a blogger I'd also add Statcounter, Technorati and Sphere. Not an online tool, but a tool that helps make getting your words online quickly and efficiently is Ecto. Highly recommended, especially if you run more than one blog.