Blogger Communities and Tools

Business Thursday: One of the best things to do for business online is cooperation. Cooperations happen everywhere on the internet, the big players are doing it and everyone is gathering and sharing information today. This is called a win win situation, a scenario advantageous to every participant. A further opportunity to bloggers beside blogrolls is the participation in blogger communities. Some communities are of general interest and others for people who take blogging serious. There one may connect with other bloggers to exchange articles and links, ideas and strategies or to cooperate elsewise. Last but not least most of these communities are offering useful tools.

blogcatalog is a weblog directory and blogger community. They are offering a discussion forum and information about blogging, blog promotion by a directory submission and features of active blogger as well as tools and widgets. The latest tool they have added is called social stream widget, which displays so called lifestreams. A lifestream is a social networking tool showing realtime information about what someone is doing at the social web actually. A popular lifestreaming service is friendfeed, which enables to follow other peoples social networking activities and to connect.

FuelMyBlog offers discussions, a forum and an own blogroll widget. At the community one may connect with others and become friends. Participating blogs are featured at a particular starting page.

Performancing is a community dedicated to professional bloggers managed by a team of entrepreneurs and professionals. At the website there is offered related information, a discussion forum and blogs. Furthermore they are offering premium services for blog promotion and do have an own advertising network and exchange at Performancing Ads, which offers a business opportunity by getting paid or to exchange traffic.

Technorati is the best known service for monitoring the live web, stories from blogs and other media like video. They are offering a couple of tools to track what happens at the social web. This may be used to be informed and to gather information about what is popular at the social web. The latter might be useful to develop a content strategy. To become noticed by Technorati and to promote an own weblog one needs to register.