Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Bloggers' Toolkit - Thing 25

Wow, there was a lot of information in Thing 25! In previous posts, I have commented on posting by e-mail (very cool!) and Blogger for Word (aargh!). I am familiar and very comfortable with widgets, gadgets and stuff. I have created a widget for the Minnesota Mineral Club (pictured here) using Sprout.

As a result of Thing 25, I have added Twit This, a search box and Apture to this blog. I also added a Clustrmap to the Minnesota Mineral Club blog. Even though I didn't add some of the items to my blog for this "thing," I have used PollDaddy, Animoto, PictureTrail, and SlideShare in the past.

Odiogo is something I wanted to try, but I was having trouble getting it to work. I have sent a help request to Odiogo, but haven't heard back from them yet. If I get a reply from Odiogo, I may try this at a later time. I may also investigate FeedBurner further.

The gadgets that I don't intend to use at this time are comment tools, statistics collection and the "get social" gadgets. These tools seem, to me, to be for more professional bloggers with higher readership.

I spent approximately 8 hours learning and trying the things in Thing 25. Apture is, by far, my favorite thing that I learned (refer to previous separate post). I think the possibilities of this application are almost limitless and it really enhances the information you deliver to your readers. The second runner up, in my favorites list, is posting by e-mail. Learning how to back-up my blogs was very valuable!

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