BlogCatalog

While the amount of mind-blowing, awe-inspiring new tools to play around with in the exhibit hall at BlogWorld Expo this year was a little lacking, I found a few tools that I think will be pretty helpful to bloggers.

1. wetoku: A tool from Zentium, Inc.that brings the talking head experience to your blog, wetoku makes it super-duper simple to record an interview online, save it and embed it on your blog.

What is required to record an interview? Well, at least one participant must have a wetoku account and both participants must have a webcam. To get a wetoku account just go to wetoku and sign up. To get a webcam...well, if you really don't know how to get a webcam contact me personally because you probably require more assistance than I can provide through this blog post ;)

Once you are signed up for a wetoku account, recording an interview just requires you to log in and click the Start Interview button. Then--unless you want to mess with the advanced settings--just title your interview, name both participants and click next. You will be provided with a invitation URL to send to your interviewee. All the interviewee needs to do is go to that URL and they will appear along with you on the weotku screen. Once you are both there, just click the red record button under the interviewer's screen and after a 3, 2, 1 countdown the recording will begin.

After the recording is finished, you will be sent to a new screen where your completed video can be viewed and the embed code for the interview is provided. Simply grab that code, pop it on your site and just like that you have a nice clean interview up on your blog. Like I said, it's super-duper simple! Here's a quick interview I did with Austin about the new BC dance we're developing Disclaimer: The dance is still pretty rough and we're both crappy dancers, so bear with us:

The only issues we had with recording the interview was the echo from the audio and a slight delay in the video. The echo is the same kind of echo I have experienced with some online seminars and conferences, and I'm not sure what can be done. I assume using headphones would solve this problem if you don't mind how they look. The video delay problem was minimized by bumping down the video quality and may have had more to do with the spotty internet connection in our building than the site itself. I'll have to try some interviews from other locations and see if that changes. Overall, still a good user experience despite the minor issues.

2. Lijit: "Using the power of people, their content, and their connections, Lijit enhances the way your readers search for and discover information on the internet. You serve as a filter for all of the results your readers could possibly receive, ensuring they only receive the most relevant results from the source they trust…YOU." -Lijit.com

Lijit provides a search function similar to what our own BC 360 Search widget does. When someone uses the tool to do a search, it will pull all the relevant content from your blog, your other networks, your bookmarks and trusted sources and display them for your reader. The driving idea here is that since you are a trusted source for your readers and they are interested in what you have to say, the results you return will be trustworthy and relevant. This is a fairly simple explanation of what Lijit provides; to see a list of all of the features and to see a sample search page, check out their site.

3.Jing: Another easy-to-use tool from TechSmith that let's you create a screenshot or a recorded screencast of your screen and easily share it with your readers. A great tool for technical bloggers, Jing allows you to record step-by-step videos as you install software, make changes to your blog's code or complete any process that can be made simpler with a supplementary video.

Installing Jing is quite easy and I was able to make my first screencast without reading the instructions or watching the instructional video. Of course, if I had watched it, figuring out how to share my video would have been simpler. Still, after realizing the screencast I had saved to my hard drive was too big to share and that I had to go to screencast.com to get URL links and embed code, I was able to login and proceed without any trouble. After that, adding the screencast to my blog was pretty simple.

To get the URL or the embed code for your screencast video, simply login at screencast.com using the email and password you registered with when installing Jing. Once in, click the My Library link at the top left. My screencast was in a folder titled Jing. I just opened the folder and saw my video there. When you hover over the video's icon, smaller icons apprear beneath it that allow you to view, edit, share or delete the video. Clicking share opens a window that provides a URL link, an embed link and an embed code for your video.

Here's the quick screencast of my iTunes screen I made using Jing (I shrank it down a lot to fit on the blog. Just in case you were wondering, the original was about 1100 pixels by 900 pixels). It takes a few seconds to load and play:

Obviously there are many, many  more tools out there that bloggers love to use. If you have any tools you use and love, please leave a comment and let us know about them. You can also add your favorite tools to the BC Tools page where you can discover, review, and rate the best tools for bloggers.