Disruptive Conversations

If you are looking to get started in "social media" - or are interested in how others survive and thrive in the world of social media - Chris Brogan's post today, "My Social Media Toolkit", may be of great help to you.  I use most all of the tools Chris lists myself, although being on Windows versus a Mac, I use Windows Movie Maker versus iMovie.  I also don't really using Upcoming.org although I've been considering using it more as a way to somewhat automate the list of events that I am attending.  In the comments to Chris' entry, I also added the following sites/services/tools that I use as well:

• del.icio.us - I use http://del.icio.us/ to bookmark and tag all the various sites I find in the course of daily work.  My del.icio.us feed is then a sidebar on a blog, posted to a link blog, etc.
  
• Feedburner - I use http://www.feedburner/ (now owned by Google) for all my RSS feeds, both for the stats and also to add links ("FeedFlare") to the feeds so that people can post my items into other services.
  
• Windows Live Writer - I'll second the comment made (in Chris' comments) by Connie Benson that Windows Live Writer truly ROCKS for an offline blog editor (if you are on Windows).  It has *greatly* increased the ease and speed with which I can post blog entries.
  
• Screen captures - A recent addition to my tool set has been SnagIt from TechSmith. It lets me (on Windows) very quickly grab a section of the screen and copy it to the clipboard - which I can then paste into Windows Live Writer.  It has again greatly accelerated the speed with which I can make blog entries that include graphics, logos, or other parts of a screen. (Here's an example.)  There's also a plugin for Windows Live Writer, although I found that just the copy/paste worked much better/faster for me.  (I'm all about speed for posting, because blogging is something I just fit into random short moments of the day.)

Anyway, those are some of the additions I would make to Chris' great list.  Hopefully this all will help folks use social media that much more effectively.