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.
I too love Windows Live Writer. I was very surprised at how good it is for beginner and experienced blogger alike. (I really need to get my father using it.)
For screen captures I found SnagIt to be a bit too heavyweight. Instead I use MS Office OneNote’s screen capture feature. It pastes the screen capture into a side note, and then from there I can treat it like a normal image to cut and paste.
Of course it doesn’t hurt that I’m already using OneNote for practically everything I do every day 🙂
Rich – Interesting, you’re the second person lately who has mentioned OneNote to me in some context. I don’t have it installed, but it’s definitely on my radar now as something to check out. Thanks, Dan
You’re almost making me regret not being a Windows user. Truly. Lots of good votes for Windows Live Writer. Bravo, Microsoft! And some great adds here, Dan. Glad you participated.
re Windows Live Writer: As good as this program is for people who fall somewhere on the geek spectrum, it’s worth noting that it’s also the EASIEST blog client for non-geeks to use — most people are plenty comfortable with MS Word, and WLW makes composing blog posts very much like writing in Word.
I run a large Movable Type installation and am training a lot of new bloggers who fit this bill, and their comfort level with WLW as compared to MT3.3 (actually MTE 1.52, but that’s same as MT3.3) is night and day. Thank the gods — I think several were on the verge of tar-and-feathering me….