Janette Toral
Digital Filipino

TODAY, there are many tools available online that can be used to create your presence and allow frequent readers to follow you on the Internet.

Here are some tools that you can use:

Panagbenga 2009 blog

• Twitter.com. Perhaps the most popular tool used by those who are seriously into social networking. It can be embedded in a blog or website and can be accessed through the mobile phone. I use this to share what is happening online, at times to rant about bad services, and often to promote new articles. There are also website services that allow to you to earn by using your Twitter to broadcast advertisement from time to time. I will tackle this next time.

• Plurk.com. Similar to Twitter but it supports threaded replies and fosters interaction as a result. Although I use this also to announce new articles, personal thoughts not meant to be disseminated to a bigger audience get discussed here.

• Facebook.com. This social network is growing with new features being introduced regularly. Status messages, article links, videos and photos posted can be replied upon by friends and mark as “liked.”

• Friendster.com. If you have a fan profile inside it, you can see who checked out your page, visit them and interact. Bulletin board postings get shared among friends and you can send an announcement to everyone as well.

• MyBlogLog.com. Allows you to create a profile for every blog or website. You will see who among MyBlogLog users visited your site. They can decide outright to follow you or after 10 visits, they get added as a follower. If your site has RSS or really simple syndication, snippets of new articles are also shown in your site’s MyBlogLog page. Furthermore, you can also broadcast messages to followers, see what sites they visit, and review your website statistics. It also has an aggregator feature where you define all your other profiles (such as YouTube, Twitter, etc.) that gets streamed and seen by MyBlogLog followers and friends.

• Another counterpart of MyBlogLog.com is BlogCatalog.com. For serious Facebook users and bloggers, NetworkedBlogs.com is fast becoming a popular site as well. Although my challenge with BlogCatalog and NetworkedBlogs is that they are not as friendly as MyBlogLog.

• Friendfeed.com. This is an aggregator of sorts. It is similar to the MyBlogLog feature where you can centralize stream updates on various services you actively use. Its beauty, though, is that this has an independent RSS feed. Therefore, instead of setting up my profile one by one in new sites, I just add my Friendfeed RSS address.

You can explore all these or check out if people you want to follow are in any of the sites.

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