Finding the right tools

I spent a lot of time during the weekend finding the right tools to promote this blog and to provide means of keeping touch with its readers (Yes, that's what I did with my weekend...)

The variety of solution that are out there for bloggers are just mind boggling! You have blog search engines, RSS feeds enhancers, statistics gathering and analysis tools, links managers, mailing lists, widgets providers, hosting for videos/pictures etc.

I am personally using Feedburner to "burn" my feed (don't ask me what that means - these guys just told me it's good...), ShinyStat to know how many readers I have and from which countries, Technorati to search enable my blog, MySpace to store external images (not post related, and yes I know that's not what MySpace is for...), YouTube to store videos, Google Groups to send posts as emails (and I am checking now FeedBlitz out for the same purpose, so people won't have to have a Gmail address), I think I enabled readers to Digg my posts (I can't even remember) and I am now exploring whether del.icio.us is worth the trouble... I may have forgotten some, but you get the picture...

Now these are only the one I use, and I am relatively new to the blogosphere. Anyway, blogging gets really complicated (if you want people to actually read what you are writing... otherwise it is quite simple, but then why write at all?...).

I wish there was a one-stop shop for all these things, but the reality of things is that though some try to give you a broader package (Like Feedburner's recent stats addition), there's always a best of breed solution that gives you exactly what you need in a specific area, so you wind up using an aggregation of different services. So, what's the conclusion? None for today, just wanted to share my blogger's plight with you guys... next post I promise to actually blog and not just complain about blogging...