Services & Tools for Bloggers

Ever since the philosophy of blogging has become popular a lot has happened in the blogosphere planet. There was a time when traditional bloggers used to rely on ms-word because of comfort factor and less exposure with web-based blogging clients. But not now, thats what these latest services appear to be saying 🙂

Zemanta & Tagaroo

Zemanta Logo

I talked about Zemanta recently and I’m happy to say that I am really enjoying it. A quick-recap of Zemanta is that is a browser-plugin(firefox/ie) or blog-platform plugin which automates your taggging, hyperlinking, image and article embedding needs via semantic search. So the moment you start keying in words in your web-based blog-editor its search starts recommending you new suggestions. Understandably, Zemanta is addressing a specific need out there and its usage depends on how you’re blogging and for what purposes you’re blogging. For example if you’re on a desktop blogging platform then it isn’t really of any help for you. Secondly, the compatibility with different blogging platforms is steadily increasing. I’d really like to see its compatibility with Drupal in the near future.

Other than that I’ve been also hearing about Tagaroo, although I’m yet to try it out.

Windows Live Writer

Image via Wikipedia

If you look at the other side desktop-blogging tools like Windows Live Writer are not far behind. The set of features and the level of functionality is in a slightly different context.

Some of the features are quite cool. For e.g. ‘Insert Map’. Traditionally you’ve to juggle around with code-snippets to insert maps in your posts. But with the new Windows Live Writer you can do with away that.

Another unique feature in ‘Insert Hyperlink’ is the ‘Automatically Link to this term’ checkbox which on being selected remembers the hyperlinks that you creates.

Like I mentioned above, the need of each of these utilities will depend on the environment you’re in. But yeah the bottom line is that the blogging community is in a win-win situation. They now have several tools, plugins, services at their disposal. Its not just about plain typing any more. The good old days of content writing in word and doing Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V to blog-editor are fast fading away.