Additional tools for blogging

Depending on how you are hosting your blog site, you may not have the tools, disk space or bandwidth to host different types of media. It's one thing to post a link to a video on Google Video, but what if you have a special video, audio/song, image that you would like to share and discuss. Well there are some additional tools (No, not by Google, but they are just as cool) you should be aware of to help complete your blogging experience.

• Castpost - Great site to host your various media formats. Castpost not only helps you organize your media, but they provide a quick HTML generator that you can then take and cut and paste a nice little flash player in your blog pointing to your media file.
• Flickr - Not only is Flciker not done by Google, but it's provided by Yahoo. But this is another great example of a Web 2.0 application. But more importantly, it gives you an account to store and organize all your images. You can link to your images, or use Flicker's slideshow, collage, and other presentation options.
• StatsCounter - Now that you have a popular blog, you will need to track your popular pages, visitors, return visitors, and overall site usage. StatsCounter offers a clean interface and script that you just insert into your page to start tracking all this good information. Google does offer a similar tool, but at this time, Statscounter appears to be a bit more mature. But that could quickly change.
• Technorati - This is a must have to understand what are people are searching for and how it relates to your site. How to draw more traffic to your site. To see who's linking to your site.

There are so many other tools that are available to use and integrate with your blog. I was just trying to show a small example that I have found to be very useful and easy to use.