The web has always been interactive, but the blogging phenomenon has accelerated the interactivity. Technorati State of the Blogsphere 2008 report reads, “With blogging so firmly entrenched in the mainstream, the story now is about the active blogsphere.

The trends, stories and behaviours here influence not only the rest of the blogsphere but mainstream media as well.” It is in this milieu that one can say, everyone should start a blog.

Let us assume that you also have a blog or two on a platform (software) of your choice. You have also defined your goals, your target audience and the type of content you will be writing. Your next aim is to pick the right blogging tools that work for you and reach out.

In addition to integration of blogging tools into free as well as premium blogging software, new blogging tools and services are being released every day to help blog masters add new features to their blogs. It can become quite overwhelming to choose between them all.

How to choose the best from among a number of blog promotion tools and add-ons? That depends on your goals, your expertise, the time you have to play around and the platform you are using. Here are a few basic solutions for different situations.

Any serious blogger needs to read a lot of other blogs to know what is going on in the ever expanding blogsphere. One of the marvel of technology is that you can have every new post from every blog you want to read delivered direct to you RSS (Really Simple Syndication). Google, Technorati and Bloglines are good online choices to start feed reading. There are so many others.

Similarly, you can make it easier for your readers to subscribe to your blog's RSS feed. “RSS is a protocol, an application of XML (Extensible Mark-up Language) that provides an open method of syndicating and aggregating web content. Using RSS files, you can create a data feed that supplies headlines, links and article summaries from your website. Users can have constantly updated content from websites delivered to them via a news aggregator, a piece of software specifically tailored to receive these types of feeds,” reads a web definition.

One of the ways to do this is to go to FeedBurner and burn your own RSS feed there and use the tools they provide to set up automatic subscriber links so that even people who want to use Bloglines, Google Reader, MyYahoo or Pluck, can subscribe to it. This can be figured out without the buttons but why not have a prominently visible button? Also create an option for people to subscribe by giving the email address so that they can receive your blog posts like an email message. FeedBurner offers this service for free.

FeedBurner also offers automatic pinging but in case you want to use a separate service for pinging, try PingGoat and Ping O Matic. Most blog software these days ping each post automatically though.

As readers walk from blog to blog, they may find interesting sites that they want to point out to their own readers. Online bookmark managers allow readers to collect, bookmark and categorise blog pages and all other interesting stuff found on the web. I use del.icio.us but BlinkList does a fine job as well.

Statistics produced by analysing the access logs for a blog are very useful for the success of blogs, in addition to being a big ego booster for the webmaster.

The number of hits also determines the click through rate for those who have subscribed to Google AdSense or other similar affiliate programmes. Countless technologies make it possible to track statistics in real time to show what other web users may be visiting or, better still, might be linking to you or posting about your blog. Technorati does this job fine. Similarly, mymloglog not only tells from where the traffic is coming but it also tracks links that a visitor is clicking on.

With almost all blog software you must go online and post using a set of tools provided by the blog software. Many bloggers like to use a desktop application (like w.blogger, Performancing and Qumana) to create and publish their posts as it gives them some extra help and allows them to more easily integrate content and files on their computer.

Many bloggers display automatically changing daily quotes or cartoons on the sidebar of their blog. The choice is endless and users can have anything on their blogs from blogchat to blogmap to time, temperature and weather display of any area or a nifty new blogbar (blogbar.com) that allows to the surfer to search using 12 search engines from a single search box that can be put on any site.

Since 2003, when I started blogging, I have been using many blog tools. The fact is that any new announcement used to attract me to try it. But over the time I have settled for site metre (statcounter.com), analytical tools (Google Analytics), news aggregators and news sourcing tools (Technorati and Blogpulse), polls (blogpolls.com), email subscription and newsletter service (feedblitz.com) and some other like pingoat, audiobloger, blogrolling, Picasa and Flickr.

When my daily blogging time starts, I first go to my invisible site metre to find who has been reading me and surfing my blogs. Then I read my feeds and know what has been happening on blogs of my interest since I last went offline, book marking items of my interests in the process. In the meantime, I plan, write and post my own entries and start pinging. At the end I read the feedback I get, firing off some replies. That is what keeps me going.