If you want access to over 1,546 themes, 20,223 plugins, and the option to upload and customize a plethora of premium themes and plugins, but you’re on the fence about starting a self-hosted blog because of the monthly cost, BlueHost has an awesome limited time offer that might just be what you need to make the jump.

It’s so good, I’m even thinking about switching to BlueHost for my personal work (currently at DreamHost).

Let’s take a look at what they’re offering.

$3.95 / month

Hosting packages usually range from $7 to $10 depending on the company, so you can tell this is a great deal for anyone interested in the basic package so they can get started.

Why is it so low — there must be something wrong with it?

It might sound too good to be true, but when you look at how they arrived at that price it makes a bit more sense. BlueHost usually offers their service on the lower end of the range ($6.95) … I’m guessing they’re able to undercut some of the competition not only because of the larger size of their company, but also because of the amount of customers referred by WordPress. On top of this, they recently slashed $2 from their standard price, bringing it down to $4.95 for everyone. And finally, you can save an additional $1 / month simply because you found out about it here … ah, the power of affiliate programs.

Another reason why they charge so much less is because they require payment upfront for the duration you select, which is either 24 months or 36 months for the $3.95 rate.

This seems to be the only downside … yet it’s also the reason you can Save $72.48 on hosting / year.

Remember, even after you pay the amount upfront and begin using the service, you can cancel anytime and collect the total amount for the months unused if you decide it’s not working out.

Reviews online reveal the customer service is great, the load time is fast (averages around 2 seconds), and downtime is minimal. In addition, the average customer service ticket response time is 15 minutes, which is great when you need an answer fast … no more waiting several days for a response. Swing by and start your self-hosted WordPress blog with BlueHost.

Install WordPress with One Click

If you’re like most bloggers, you’re not that tech-savvy … BlueHost understands this and strives to make it as easy as possible to get started.

One-Click Installation of WordPress

BlueHost was one of the first hosting companies to introduce the 1-click installation of the WordPress software, which will save you a lot of time and headache if you’re not tech-savvy. This feature enables you to install the WordPress software to your domain with one click instead of manually downloading the software and uploading the files to your host using an FTP client.

If that last part just overloaded your brain, then this feature is for you because it enables you to forget about it!

Start Customizing Your Blog Instantly

There’s no need to wait for everything to propagate — click to install, then enjoy creating your blog. No wait time. No wasted time. No headaches or frustration.

Get Started here – Just $3.95 / month!

BlueHost Solutions Designed for WordPress Bloggers

BlueHost has long been one of the leading web host service providers for WordPress users due to its simplicity and ease of use. Not only has it been described as the best solution for people who aren’t interested in dealing with the technical aspects of hosting, it’s also the number one solution recommended by WordPress.

Money-Back Guarantee

This is a big bonus for those still on the fence, because it eliminates the risk of being stuck for a year of service you don’t use. This is especially helpful for bloggers that find they aren’t quite as vocal as they thought, and want to shut everything down. As mentioned, to take advantage of the super-low price, payment for the duration of service is required upfront instead of month-to-month. If you want to request your money back for some reason, you’ll receive total months worth of service you haven’t used.

Unlimited Space and Bandwidth

Some hosts limit the amount of disc space you have, which means you can only upload so many images, write so many posts, and create so many pages. Blogging isn’t designed to work within limits … BlueHost helps you break free from this with their service.

Unlimited Email Accounts

This is often packaged into hosting plans, but it depends on the host — sometimes this is a different service all together. If you’re striving to take your blog further, then you probably want a unique email address people will remember. In terms of branding, the best thing you can do in the beginning is drop all 3rd party names possible. In this case, you’d be moving away from gmail, yahoo, or other email providers, which will help focus on your brand.

chris@fuelyourblogging.com – vs – chrisatfuelyourblogging@gmail.com

Free Domain Name

In addition to gaining access to the plethora of unique themes and plugins, the reason most bloggers choose the self-hosting route is so they can build their blog on a domain focusing on their brand. The incentive here is that most hosts will through in a free domain if you sign up for hosting (most .com domains are valued around $9.99 / year).

www.fuelyourblogging.com – vs – www.fuelyourblogging.wordpress.com

This is particularly important because it enables you to move away from any 3rd party names, like WordPress, Tumblr, and Blogspot, making it easier on you to brand your blog as something unique.

$100 Free Google Credit

If you’ve been thinking about advertising your work using the Google ad network, AdWords, this is your chance to do so … FREE. Google gives out $100 worth of advertising free so people can give it a test drive. There’s no better way to test whether or not PPC (pay per click) advertising is right for you and your blog, but you need to be careful because the service doesn’t self-terminate once the $100 threshold is met … you could end up owing a lot more than $100 if you don’t manage your account.

24 Hour Customer Support … with WordPress Expertise

The one thing I first encountered with DreamHost (my current host) is the lack of knowledge of WordPress, which was very frustrating at times. That said, DreamHost, along with many other hosts, now offer unofficial WordPress customer support.

BlueHost is no exception.

The customer support team offers 24 hours of support, 7 days a week, and tote a 15 minute average ticket response time as well as free theme installation service … never heard of that before, but it will help the rookie blogger save time.

Impressive.

Get $3.95 / month hosting or your blog here.

WordPress Recommends BlueHost

Even WordPress recognizes the awesome service BlueHost provides and recommends their service to bloggers as the number one source for hosting.

Why You Need a Self-Hosted Blog

As mentioned, people that pay for a hosting plan and host their own blog have the opportunity to brand their domain, register as many branded emails they want, including contact@yourblog.com, and gain access to the two most important aspects of blogging … custom themes and plugins.

I install 9 or 10 plugins to every blog I use to publish content … when you go with WordPress hosting, you can’t install themes or plugins, thus, you can’t customize your blog to its full potential.

Benefits:

• Install plugins and add functionality to your blog.
• Install themes and create a more unique viewing experience for your readers.
• Brand the domain
• Register as many emails as you’d like

WordPress Plugins You Can’t Get Without Self-Hosted Blog

1. Editorial Calendar
2. WordPress SEO by Yoast
3. WordPress Popular Posts
4. Tweet Old Post
5. HelloBar
6. Contact Form 7
7. Akismet
8. Google XML Sitemaps
9. Yet Another Post Plugin
10. WP Super Cache

Without these plugins, my blogs wouldn’t have the functionality it has today. I wouldn’t be able to see an overview of my posts using the editorial calendar, tweet old posts on twitter automagically using Tweet Old Post, or speed up the performance of my blog without WP Super Cache.

The list can go on, but I digress.

Overall, A Great Deal … Here’s How to Get Started

Again, BlueHost is the hosting company with the reputation for being super-easy to use, so you can get started as early as today. I’m really impressed with what I’ve heard about BlueHost over the years. The service has its fair share of downtime and throttling, but you won’t escape that so long as you’re paying for shared hosting.

Here’s a glance at the process:

Register Your Free Domain

Create Your Account

Add Your Billing Information

This finalizes the process and marks the beginning of your self-hosted blogging career! After you’ve registered and selected the one-click install for WordPress, you’ll be able to begin customizing your blog.

Get Started Here – Save $72.48 on hosting

Better Friend Finding Functionality

WordPress recently introduced a new and improved version of Friend Finder, which of course, is not to be confused with the online dating service. Previously, this feature was rarely used due to its lack of efficiency. In fact, several bloggers reported lackluster results when using it to find contacts on the popular blogging platform, which is in stark contrast to the reputation similar features on other sites have established for being fairly accurate. Users who have switched over to the updated, social-friendly feature are reporting amazing efficiency and good things overall.

For a blogger, having the ability to easily find contacts throughout the blogosphere and social web can be a tremendous luxury. A simple search, for example, could lead you to discover an old friend or colleague who has a blog similar to your own. This might lead to a situation where the two of you start sharing ideas, helping each other drive traffic, and doing other things that improve your blogging efforts. And with the updated Friend Finder leveraging a popular blogging platform like WordPress and social networks such as Facebook, in particular, you are much more likely to be led to something good rather than a dead end.

Finding and Using Friend Finder

The new and improved Friend Finder for WordPress makes it incredibly easy to search the social networks for contacts. All you have to do login to your blog administrative panel, go to the “Readers” section at the top of the page, and click on the “Friend Finder” tab. Next, simply choose the service you want to use to find contacts on, and give WordPress access to perform the search. From there, Friend Finder will search the blog platform’s vast database for any blogs that match your query based on the social networking account you specified.

If matches are found, they will be presented to you in the form of a list of the people you know who have blogs on WordPress. You can choose to keep up with those individuals by clicking the “Follow” tab next to their name, which will ensure that you are updated through “Blogs I Follow” in the Reader section each time they publish a new post.

Conclusion

It is important to note that the new and improved WordPress Friend Finder feature not only finds contacts on Facebook, but Twitter and Google as well. There are no tedious installations to deal with, so if you’re interested, login into to your WordPress account and give it a try.

This can be incredibly frustrating when trying to convey what you do to people interested, because when you try to describe it all to someone interested … you ultimately end up with nothing more than an incomprehensible description.

Make it easier on yourself and check out CarbonMade — it’s all about the online portfolio.

With nearly 500,000 portfolios already published, carbonmade is making it a lot easier for people to organize, display, and share their multiple creative projects. Here are a few features that might make your mouth water:

• no html knowledge needed
• customizable subdomain available
• customize footer blurb
• customize header
• two font face options
• two color schemes
• add 3 projects free
• upgrade to $12 month for logo options, 50 projects, and other cool stuff.

The Portfolio Page

Take a look at the portfolio of fellow fuel editor and friend, Christopher Jackson.

The About Page

You also get a page for your bio, so you have a chance to reveal more about yourself as an artist, professional, or ninja in a clean, presentable area of your portfolio.

Do you have a carbonmade portfolio?

If you have one, share it with us here in the comment section so we can check ‘ya out!

Blekko is working on it.

As a new search engine, Blekko is approaching the world of search a little differently. The search engine has introduced a new way to browse the web, called slashing, which enables you to search not only a keyword, but a category as well.

Slash the web

If you were in need of a volleyball, you could search for “volleyball /shop,” and the results would provide you with pages related not only to shop or volleyball, but volleyball and where you could buy one.

Flag spam, create, and share

In addition, the little search engine provides tools to flag spam as you find it throughout the engine. On top of that, you can create your own slash, which is just another way to save a page for later or categorize it for friends.

Check it out, and start slashing the web!

www.blekko.com

Between iCloud, Amazon Silk, the Facebook Timeline, and Google+, it’s almost impossible to keep up … +RobertScoble makes it a little easier.

Among the frenzy, there’s not only a design overhaul taking place over at Google, but a product overhaul as well. A handfull of products have been updated to include the new features introduced with Google+, including the plus one button.

Among these products is Google Analytics — one of the most popular analytics applications available.

In addition to the new design, Google Analytics now provides real-time data and a premium version of Google Analytics. While the latter is more for super-publishers interested in using Google as their main source for their metrics, the real-time data is available to all, and will likely prove beneficial for those interested in learning more about their visitors.

A few other new and old features we’ll have at our tips:

• Analytics Intelligence
• Advanced Segmentation
• Flexible Dashboard Customization
• Ecommerce Analytics
• Mobile Tracking
• Setting Goals
• Social Activity Tracking
• Custom Reporting

I’m excited about the new Google Analytics! I’m still exploring the new interface, but from what I can tell, it’s just better. Seamless integration with Webmaster Tools, ease-of-use is at an all time high, and the design is beautiful. Read more about it here.

Have you signed up for the beta version yet? What do you think about Google Analytics as a whole?

People to circle on Google+ …

+RobertScoble
+DannySullivan

But is it possible to optimize when you share content so your content reaches the largest amount of people possible?

In short, yes. But is it right for you?

The Power of Now

The discussion of whether or not to schedule Tweets, for example, has been debated since the beginning. On one hand, you have the chance to create a steady stream of content throughout the day upfront in just a few minutes. On the other, people are often turned off by scheduled tweets as it isn’t true to the one of the most attractive aspects of Twitter … the importance of now. What’s happening now? What are you doing now? Connecting with people now. Learning the news as it happens.

The Ability to Schedule Tweets … Kinda

I’d very much like to hear what you think about scheduling Tweets, as I’ve recently swayed from one side to the other. I used to be hardcore anti-scheduling, because I believe in the power of now. What changed my mind was a website called Timely.is, which enables Twitter users a limited ability to schedule Tweets.

Instead of enabling people to schedule out tweets for every other minute, Timely.is stresses what they do on the optimization aspect of scheduling. You have to check it out for yourself, but the idea is pretty simple: they will take a tweet you’d like to schedule, look at the history of your personal metrics on Twitter, and schedule your tweet for the best possible time. You can’t control when it hits, aside from an option to select “within 30 minutes,” and you can only tweet up to 9 times per day. Continue past that limit with your scheduling, and it will carry over to the next day.

In addition, Timely.is offers the ability to see how well your tweets are doing. A quick glance reveals that my collective tweets (under 30) have accumulated a total reached of over 110,000.

The power of Timely.is is their ability to monitor your metrics, see when people are looking at their stream, re-tweeing content, and doing their own bit of sharing. They target the busiest times where you’re likely to influence others to share and interact.

Don’t Try to Fake Social Interaction

One thing I stand strict on when it comes to scheduling tweets is that I don’t schedule anything that appears as if I’m active on Twitter at that moment. I don’t schedule questions (unless it’s the title of a post) and I don’t interact with scheduled tweets … I simply use the scheduling ability to share content during the best time possible.

This is just one approach though. What do you think about scheduling how you share content? Have you used timely.is yet?

It’s pretty awesome.

Look for another post strictly about Timely.is, complete with screenshots of the metrics they provide as they track your progress, and more.

If you’re excited about this as I am, start using it … help them by answering surveys … sign up for news. Let’s help them out by letting them know we’re really excited about their work.

If you’re not on team Timely.is, let us know why in the comments below.

photo credit: James Bond UK

GoSquared has recently updated its LiveStats tool, which provides instant blog analytics. It’s not the only web application to do this – both Woopra and Clicky offer real time views – but this simple tool has a lot to offer. Within a minute of sign up you can see live blog stats so you can respond instantly to what your visitors are seeing and doing.

GoSquared has two main views – live stats and trends. The live stats view has three columns. On the left you can find out about referrals and searches. It also has a tweet search column which automatically includes your site title and site link. You can also include another keyword phrase, but when testing this the site did not save the search, resulting in gobbledygook in the results view.

The middle column shows which pages visitors are on and how many there are. The right column gives a breakdown of the visitor metrics (including returning and tagged visitors). Click on a visitor in this column to get more details, including which pages each visitor has opened and how long they have stayed there. A red dot or red border indicates that a page has been left open but there’s no activity.

The information you get here allows you to respond instantly to what is happening on your site. That’s a great way to impress your visitors and convert them to repeat visitors, thus growing your blog’s community.

GoSquared also offers a trends view with daily, weekly, monthly and annual stats. The best thing about this is that everything you need to know about your site appears on a single page in a number of movable widgets. You can switch between different time periods on individual widgets or change them all at once via clickable links at the top of the screen. All essential blog metrics are available at a glance – in fact, if you have a large screen, it takes just one scroll of the mouse to see them all.

Taken together, the information gained from stats and trends can guide bloggers’ content development efforts (both blog posts and information products). They can also see which sites are the best ones to promote the blog on and to build relationships with referring sites.

So what does all this great functionality cost? Well, up to 100,000 page views it is absolutely free. That allows you to monitor a single site and is great if you are just starting out. If you need more, you can monitor a total of three sites and 150,000 page views a month for $9.99 a month. There are also business and enterprise plans.

As well as being available on the web, GoSquared is also accessible via a Chrome web app and a Wordpress plugin.

First impressions are that this is a very useful blog analytics program. The founders say that “Monitoring your website’s traffic should be simple, fun & enlightening.” The GoSquared app does its best to deliver just that.

This post was written by Lior who is a consultant to a live chat support software startup and also advises to 123 neon signs, a well known online neon signs shop.

I’ve seen other online corkboards, but the developers of Spaaze thought of everything I’ve been looking for! Here’s a screenshot of what I threw up in about two minutes on a sample Fuel Your Blogging board.

You can even visit the board I created and drag stuff to share on Twitter or Facebook.

Spaaze Has Awesome Features

• A sweet user interface.
• An ipad-optimized site.
• Customizeable url’s for boards you make public.
• Collaboration by email without making a board public.
• Add photos.
• Add videos from Youtube or Vimeo with just the URL.
• Add notes that look like paper or stickies.
• Add html snippets from anywhere, like Twitter lists, etc.
• Add premium features, but most of it is free.

I also like the fact that you can pay for some extras. I like free, web 2.0 sites except for one problem – they often disappear because of an unsustainable business model. Hopefully Spaaze is here to stay, especially since I’m using it to organize my massive collection of llama hairs.

Using Spaaze for Blogging

How can you use Spaaze to manage your blog? Here is what when through my head as I looked the site over.

• Brainstorming space – throw ideas on the board.
• Source pinning. There’s a bookmarklet that lets you bookmark articles to the board from anywhere. (”Now where did I bookmark that story?”)
• Collaboration. Here’s what I’m planning to write about, what about you guys?
• Free files. You can pin pics or files to the board and make it public.
• To do (or to write) lists.

And I’m sure there are other ways to use Spaaze as well. What do you think?

According to Quora’s people,

Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. Quora was founded in April 2009 by Adam D’Angelo, who was previously CTO and VP of engineering at Facebook, and Charlie Cheever, who led Facebook Connect and Facebook Platform.

Source

So it’s about questions and answers. But all of the questions are editable by all of the users, as are the answers. You can follow people, but you can also follow topics and questions, and even answers to questions. You can give things thumbs up. So is it like Wikipedia? Uh, no. Wikipedia is all answers and no questions.

Quora has been adopted by media agencies and mainstream users much more quickly than Twitter and Facebook, but that may be due in part to the fact that we all feel stupid for being such slow adopters of those tools. And Quora doesn’t really compete with either directly, or even with LinkedIn, which also has a robust question and answer feature. It’s different, which is a difficult feat to accomplish, in and of itself.

It integrates with your blog. You can post your questions and answers directly to your blog, even a self-hosted version of Wordpress. The idea is to become the largest repository of socially-produced answers to the largest batch of questions anyone could possibly ever ask.

Facebook owns the social graph for now. Google owns the map of the URL’s of the world. And Twitter owns the rapid distribution of news and opinion. Will Quora own collaborative social research?

Have you used Quora? What do you think?

Here’s a sweet video overview that finally answers the question of how to pronounce the name “Posterous.” (I’ve been saying it wrong for far too long.)

And in their own words…

Posterous Groups is the simplest way to communicate with your group. Here’s how it works:

Creating a group is as simple as sending an email. Just send an email to newgroup@posterous.com and you are off and running

No account sign up required. This means no more waiting for Mom to complete the signup process; instead, just add her email address and she’s in your group. Every time you post to the group, she’ll receive the full content as an email. She can reply directly to your email and everyone in the group gets her update.

Brilliant handling of rich media. To share photos, a video or audio file, just attach it to your email. All photos are displayed in your emails without attachments and the group’s threaded web view will automatically host and embed videos, audio files . . . any file that you send. Just send it to Posterous Groups and it will do the right thing.

Private is the default option. You have full control over who sees your photos and who participates in your group.

And why is this so cool? As their blog declares, group management has been a fairly neglected area of web development in the last few years. We’ve seen enormous advancement in blogging platforms, niche social networks, and social sharing platforms, but very few developments along the lines of managing a group (outside of the web monopoly Facebook platform, that is).

So, jump in. Give it a shot. And comment below to let us know what your experience was like and what you think about this new option for managing a Posterous (pronounced like PASTA, but with an erous on the end) site.

It’s been an unwritten rule for a long time that you should host your own content if you’re in blogging for the long haul, and one of the most widely used platforms is a self-hosted version of Wordpress. Wordpress also offers a free, hosted version of its platform at Wordpress.com, but your content sits on Wordpress’s servers rather than your own.

Now, however, Wordpress.com might just be an even better gateway into serious blogging because of a nifty new feature whereby they will allow you to direct your traffic to an external spot. In other words, you can start a blog on Wordpress.com, build it, move it to your own server later, then redirect your old blog’s traffic to the new one automatically.

Turn to Wordpress! At least that’s what you do when you’re Microsoft and you don’t get blogging enough to create a great platform for online publishing. In case you hadn’t heard, Microsoft will be migrating all of their Windows Live Spaces blogs over to Wordpress.com.

This move tells us a few things about the industry…

• Don’t ignore open source. It’s gaining momentum.
• Matt Mullenweg is one smart guy (smart enough to score the domain ma.tt).
• Wordpress is awesome and has a phenomenal, but mysterious business model and has epitomized the freemium model.
• Microsoft understands that they do only a limited number of things well… I just can’t think of what they are.

I do have a hunch, though, that we’re all going to be surprised in a year or two by some other up-and-comer who brings even more awesomeness to the table. It could be a present player like SquareSpace or Mephisto, but it’s more likely to be something you and I haven’t heard of yet, as was this little thing called “Wordpress” just a half decade ago.

If you work for Microsoft, I’m only kidding… but feel free to clarify in the comments what it is that Microsoft does well…

First, let’s agree that your audience is varied and you can’t please everyone – but they all follow your for some reasons (yes, in plural) and trying to understand those reasons is the key.

Your Blog Readership – Layers

One of the great speakers at BlueGlass LA was Ben Huh, CEO of Cheezburger Network – I think everyone reading now got it immediately: LOL cats! Now, the most important thing to know about the blogs is they are user-generated – which means the people behind the network managed to build a strong 100%-self-built community – the perfect example of great user engagement and interaction.

So how did they do that?

The answer is simple (no, it’s actually not that simple): understanding how your community is (being) built.

The first law of community you need to know is that it’s not all about “active” users. You need to grow both the commenters and the people who don’t talk. That’s the whole community. Your community is not just the people who generate content: it’s the people who read and use it.

Communities are made of up delicate layers of users: you should listen to ALL of them.

Whilst engaging with these “active” portions of your readership is certainly important, you need to keep in mind that they are (in most cases) the vocal minority. Most of your followers will be people who silently surf through your content, but who will never really feel the need to interact with you as you don’t take the time to actively appeal for them to do so.

Twitter or Facebook isn’t to everyone’s taste (believe it or not) and knee-jerk comments may prove to not be particularly useful, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still engage your audience to find out information that you can be used to better understand what kind of content they want you to produce.

A couple of my favorite ways for getting feedback from my readers are:

Setting Up “Personality Tests”

For some reason people just love taking these kinds of quizzes, which makes the ideal for finding out pretty much anything you want about your readership. You will need to adapt the titles of the quizzes to suite the type of blog you are running. On some blogs “What Kind of Computer Are You?” will go down very well, whilst on others you may need something more along the lines of “Which of the Disciples Do You Most Resemble?”.

Making a fun quiz that appeals to your specific target audience can be difficult, but it is vitally important, if you get it right you’ll be amazed just how many normally silent people you can get to participate.

My favorite tool for making these kinds of tests is ProProfs that has a nifty online testing utility, a really simple to use website which lets you make fully interactive quizzes, graphics and all, with very little effort. So for example using the site I set up a quiz labeled “Which Type of Twitter User You Are”, as an attempt to learn more about my audiences tweeting habits, but I did it in such a way so as to appeal to their inquisitive (and competitive) nature regarding where they ranked compared to my other readers.

Tests like these are really simple to set up, not to mention they can be a lot of fun to create, once you’re done you can embed them straight into your website ready for use. Analyzing the results can yield a real goldmine of information. The Quiz School stats pages give a complete overview of how each individual answered each specific question, as well as charts documenting the overall voting amongst all those who responded.

Below are the result analytics I got from my quiz maker – plenty of data to dig into. Here’s the report itself (notice that you can actually see the user names, details and result):

And here are some visualization tools to allow you to analyze the data better (for example, you can see the answer break-down for each particular question):

Using Survey’s

Survey’s often provide a most useful forms of customer feedback, especially ones which allow for users to leave their own comments regarding specific questions. Unfortunately long survey’s can be a lot more difficult to get people to fill in when compared to short quizzes which appeal to their sense of fun.

If you think you can entice enough of your users to fill in a Survey as to make it worthwhile, there are a couple of options available to you. Firstly you could use a third party website like Survey Monkey to set up and track the results of your survey. Alternatively if you are using Wordpress to run your blog then you could use a simple Wordpress plugin to do the job for you. The second option giving the advantage of maintaining full control of the survey through the back end of your site, as well as complete privacy when it comes to the information compiled.

Do you use any tools to get to know your blog readers better? Please share them in the comments!

Post image by B Rosen

In this awkward stage people often become consumed with the tools available and value them over the principles that underly our work. But the underlying principle that makes social media such a vital part of the web is that people naturally long to relate to one another. They long to be deeply known.

Facebook and Twitter provide a means of reaching out and knowing someone. They offer points of access to others – points that didn’t exist before. But how do you explore those contacts more deeply? How do you take the next step beyond a tweet and really mine your established relationships for the kind of data that really connects people?

You can start with tools like these:

Gist

Gist takes the people you’re normally in contact with across the social web and shows you a cross-section of their online activity and an extended profile of them. Get Gist.

Rapportive

Rapportive replaces your Gmail sidebar ads with social web information about the person from whom the email you are reading was sent. It pulls from a variety of sources, shows recent tweets, and gives you a good picture of the person.

Threadsy

Threadsy does several things very well. It pulls together incoming messages from across various networks and puts them into a common inbox. This includes email, mentions, and direct messages. It also provides a networking client alongside the inbox and a sweet email signature to boot.

There are others. In fact, there are more added almost daily. We’re watching a positive trend in that there is a growing focus on building relationships and not just “follower counts.”

What do you use to deepen relationships across the social web?

Boasting plugins for three major browsers (Firefox, Chrome, and Safari), Scribefire is a pretty powerful tool. Check out the screenshot of my editing a post here on Fuel…

What impresses me is that everything I need to do in my normal post editing window is available through Scribefire. We would expect such a plugin to include secondary details such as categories and tags, but Scribefire even includes custom fields.

One of the more useful features is the ability to switch between blogs (assuming you manage multiple blogs) and write and edit instantaneously without logging into different backends. And the only disadvantage? There doesn’t seem to be a way to utilize Wordpress’ media uploading features. You can only add images by url.

My opinion of Scribefire is pretty high. If you’re looking for a very simple, in-browser tool for writing and editing on multiple blogs, it’s an excellent choice. But I’m still a control freak, so to write this review, I still logged in the old-fashioned way. Some habits die hard.