Tools | Social Signal

What are the essential tools for blogging and online conversation in 2009? Social Signal friend and advisor Leda Dederich recently asked me for an update to the post I wrote on this topic four years ago. Happily, SoSi staffer Karen Fung recently wrote an excellent post that ran through the specific tools I reviewed in 2005. But I thought I'd step back and offer an answer to the underlying question: what tools do I need to participate effectively in the thriving world of social media?

Updated: the third step isn't working at the moment, because that service has closed its doors for a while. We'll let you know if that changes.

If you've launched a Twitter account for a company or project, you've faced the same problem we've got here at Social Signal: how do I translate all the follows and followers on my individual account into a set of follows and followers on our Social Signal account?

There's no way to move my followers to @socialsignal, except by renaming my @awsamuel account, and then what would I use to twitter personally? What I can do is get Social Signal to follow the same people I'm following personally; that will give me an easy way to get into a conversation with my new @socialsignal hat on, and encourage them to follow our @socialsignal account too.

In 2005, fresh out of the Online Deliberation 2005 conference, Social Signal CEO Alexandra Samuel wrote about 10 tools that tap the power of blogs. As we were working on relaunching our website, we had a chance to take a second look at this post and thought it'd be fun to do a bit of a retrospective: what's happened to these 10 tools in the past 4 years, as blogging has become more popular and mainstream?

Today I took a giant leap forward in my update-ability. (If date-ability refers to your in-person hotness, update-ability speaks to your hotness in the social media pressure cooker of Twitter, Facebook, Jaiku etc.) If I'm going to be entirely honest, my virtual hotness has been severely limited by my relatively infrequent Twitterings. Not only do I eat, change my musical selection and go to the bathroom without posting the minute-by-minute update, but I even sometimes have actually vaguely interesting thoughts that pass through my head without being captured in my conversation stream.