Blogging is no longer  a frequently updated short posts on your area of interest. Blogs are the place to Interact, collaborate and share likes, dislikes, experience, feel etc. Your web site should interact with your reader engage them in conversation. This will lead to bookmarking, referring friend, tweeting on your writing etc and hence more traffic to your site. Google web elements have created few interactive tools to enhance your support for Google signed in users. These are the must tools for anyone to create collaborative and interactive weblog platform. All you need is to signin to google and take a code, paste it in your website.

• Google Connect – Common thread to connect your visitors. Every posts (number of posts by user) in your blog will be available as href link in users connect page. This will available as a profile, a unknown person visiting a user’s profile will see your link as well. Popularly known as Google Friend connect is a simple way to grow your community.
• Conversation Element – Conversation element helps users to post comment and interact with themselves. Conversation is an add-on to signed in google friend connect users.
• Orkut Share element – It helps users to share your posts/site to his orkut buddies.
• Maps – Helps you to add a small map window in your blog posts in order to refer places mentioned in your posts. Location specific details is a great utility to increase user experience.
• Custom search element – It allows user to search you site or web from your web site.

More than the usage of these enhancer, actual placement matters more. Visitor for the first time mostly happens through organic, but making them visit again is completely on your control. Add more useful element and allow conversation to grow. Though blogging is so powerful with comments and track backs, untouched areas like sharing utility, conversation utility, social media through using friend connect ornaments further.

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Blogs pave the path to share and to express your ideas. Blog needs a  fuel called readership. Social media helps you to increase readership and hence adding a social dimension becomes an important aspect of blogging. People love to share useful information. Your fresh short posts should have ways to share and express. Comments in your blog is one part of it, presence in sharing platforms like facebook, twitter, Yahoo buzz, digg, delicious, stumble upon helps to attract external readers. This is also termed as organic readership growth. Power of social media is well know. One classic example is the story of Time Warner cable and it’s increased use of tweets as main medium to solve customer issues, and information exchange.

How to add social dimension to Blog?

Comments etiquette – Comments are compulsory in blog posts. Allow readers to express their opinion. Respect freedom of expression, anchor to any blog.

Twitter - Having a twitter account against your domain name or blog motto is  must. Create auto tweets using plugins. A tweet in url, if useful will get re tweeted by others and sharing will provide exponential traffic to your blogs. Read more about how to get engaged in twitter. Plugins you must have in your blog.

Social Bookmarking – Bookmarking websites helps you to create incoming links, and link sharing. Most of the bookmarking websites allow you to give abstract of your actual content. Some the famous plug-ins for social bookmarking sites are Sociable (WordPress) helps you to share contents in close to 199 social bookmarking sites.

Web profiles – Let your web profiles have link to your blogs and blogs to your social profile. Blogs are not just  a way to create a posts, It is a way to “LET THE WORLD KNOW WHO YOU ARE“

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I’m really blown away by how many Blogger users are still using their Blogspot address instead of getting their own Custom Domain that Blogger has so generously offered.

The reasons for wanting your own Custom Domain Name aren’t only just for Blogspot users. It goes for ALL bloggers as well, so let me explain the benefits of getting your own Custom Domain name.

A lot of people don’t seem to appreciate or understand what this really means. Many bloggers are worried about how it will affect their blog page rank instead of embracing this wonderful feature.

Ironically, it’s your blog page rank that will benefit (amongst others) when you make the move to a Custom Domain.

Six Blog Tips why you should be using a Custom Domain with Blogger:

1. After you purchase your own Custom Domain you will own your blog address instead of Blogspot. Right now Blogger is getting all of the credit – not YOU.
2. Once you purchase your Custom Domain you will own your posts. Why? Because your posts will no longer have the butt-ugly Blogspot subdomain tacked on it, so YOU will get the pagerank credit and not Blogger.
3. When you own a Custom Domain you can move your blog to be hosted wherever you want and keep your page rank because your links will still remain the same.
4. Your blog traffic statistics will no longer be diluted. I own http://www.blogbloke.com, and I used to forward that URL to my http://instabloke.blogspot.com address. So I had to insert separate codefor each URL (my custom domain and blogspot) into my template which split the data for my real stats.
5. Before Blogger Custom Domains came along I had to use URL forwarding to my Blogspot address. URL forwarding is confusing because it creates a frame that makes every page show the same address as the Custom Domain instead of the actual post page. So trying to navigate your site can create unexpected results and frustration for your readers. Frames can also confuse the search engines (i.e. GoogleBot) which will have dire consequences for your blog PageRank and SEO.
6. Not having a Custom Domain also creates a problem for blog tracking sites. For the same reasons above it confuses the data for sites such as the Truth Laid Bear, Alexa, Technorati etc. So your rank with them also gets diluted.

Trust me folks when I say the benefits of owning your own Custom Domain far outweigh any concerns that you could ever have. This alone is the most exciting feature that New Blogger has introduced.

If you blog long enough you will eventually want your own Custom Domain. The longer you put it off the more you will regret not doing it so my advice is everyone should take advantage of this generous offer today.

Article in http://blogbloke.com http://www.blogbloke.com/6-reasons-why-you-should-be-using/

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“Weblog” a webpage used by an individual to post content of his interest for the intended readers. A good blog is a one which has attractive/quality content for the intended readers. Blogging tools play an essential role to keep regular readers and to attract new readers. Natural growth for weblogs takes the writer to create his identity in the form of domain name and weblog platform. Following are the few essential blogging tools one must use in his weblogs.

1. Subscription tools and News aggregation service – A very important route  to reach your regular readers and update them on latest posts.
   1. FeedBlitz
      • Zookoda
      • Aweber
      • Yutter
      • RssFwd
      • Feedburner’s Email Subscription Service
2. Updater to attract your contacts
   1.  Google Reader - Although I still prefer reading blogs directly, there’s no doubt that a RSS reader helps manage all the news happening around the blogosphere. If you want to stay on top of the game, it’s an essential tool in your blogging arsenal.
   2. Tweet this in every post, and Twitter update for every post
   3. Status updates in IMs like Gtalk, MSN, ICQ, and AOL
   4. Link in your signature
3. Blog promotion through social networking sites, in places were bloggers meet and interact, for example blogcatalog, mybloglog, blogger forum
4. Visit other bloggers websites and comment about their posts. Contribute to blogger community by writing one or two posts related to blogging.
5. Feature rich widgets to felicitate the visitors, like Google friends connect, blogcatalog visitors gallery, country from the visitor widgets etc
6. Site visitor statistics and metric tools
   1. Google analytics
   2. site meter
   3. AWstat
   4. webalizer
   5. stat counter
   6. mint and web-analyze

Other Blog Tools

1. • Pingoat – pinging service
   • Pingomatic – another pinging service
   • BlogRolling – a service to manage your blog roll
   • TalkDigger – ‘find, follow and join conversations evolving on the Internet.’
   • Blog Flux – Stats, Pinging and Directory 

   • coComment – Keep track of the comments you leave on different blogs in a central place
   • co.mments – Similar name to coComment but not to be confused with it – a way of bookmarking and following comment threads via RSS
   • Digg – Another major Social Bookmarking site
   • TagCloud – produces Tag Clouds for your blog from RSS feeds
   • Tiny URL – Turns long URLs into tiny manageable ones
   • YouTube – a tool for putting video on your blog
   
   

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