This integration and interaction is especially true for bloggers, when you want to connect with other bloggers as well as the community that you’ve built around your own blog.

So, in no particular order, I thought I’d share some tools that might help you (as bloggers) connect more. Feel free to use or abuse.

BackType. It’s no secret that I’ve been a huge fan of BackType since its launch. Allowing you to follow the conversations from anywhere you’ve ever left a comment online, it also allows you to see what the people you’re interested in are saying, and where.

Now, with their new Connect option, they’ve just taken it to a whole new level.

You can see comments from other blog’s about you; how many times your post has been referenced on Twitter, Reddit, Digg, etc; and allows you to see the other conversations that your blog commentators are having. Here’s an example of it in use on this blog (just scroll up a little and you’ll see the info just above the trackback link).

I can see a lot of potential in this addition to BackType’s services and if it helps promote more blogs and conversations into the bargain, that’s got to be a good thing. (If you’re on BackType, you can connect with me here).

Scribnia. This is a pretty new service and one that has just gone into private alpha, so you need an invitation (you can email them for one). What I really like about Scribnia is the idea behind it.

Basically, Scribnia will be an online resource that rates and reviews bloggers, journalists, reporters and more. Using a metric system based on context ratings and mini-reviews that Scribnia members provide, you can soon see who’s worth reading in your areas of interest.

I’m testing it out at the minute and so far it looks a really useful way to sort out the stuff that you really want to read. Think of it as your personal feed recommendation engine. (If you’re on Scribnia, you can connect with me here – note, you  need to be logged in).

MyBlogLog. If you blog and have a Yahoo account, then MyBlog Log is something you should definitely check out. Almost like one huge online community, MyBlogLog has a ton of features that bring bloggers and readers together.

Every time you visit a MyBlogLog-enabled site, your details are remembered. You can then choose to become a member of that blog’s community (see the sidebar plugin on this blog), connect with the blog author, or see other like-minded readers and connect with them.

You can also display all your online identities, so anyone using MyBlogLog can connect with you there as well. The only real downside is that you need a Yahoo account so it may not be for everyone. (If you’re on MyBlogLog, you can connect with me here).

These are just three tools that offer bloggers a great way to connect. There are a few more, and I’ll be looking at some of these in a future post.

How about you? Do you use any of these services? If so, what do you think about them? Or are there others that you’d recommend?

Connecting the Dots originally appeared on Danny Brown - under a Creative Commons license.

• Users set up an account at BackType and register (or claim) their blog or website URL’s. These would be the ones that you would normally input whenever leaving a comment on a blog. If you’re not a blog owner, BackType will provide you one when you register.

• This then allows BackType to recognize you whenever you post a comment to any blog you visit. That comment will then be attributed to you for the lifetime of that blog post.

The benefits of this are two-fold. You can have an immediate visual history of all the comments you’ve ever left (as long as the same URL has been used by you). Additionally, you can revisit posts from years ago and see if your views have changed.

On top of that, you can also follow your favourite bloggers and see what comments they are making. This allows you a great insight into the mindset of the people you respect and read regularly. And as a tool for businesses, knowing what’s being said about your company can offer an excellent opportunity to gauge public opinion of you.

Now, BackType are adding to the benefits already offered with a slew of new features. In a newsletter sent to BackType users, the company made the following announcement:

We’ve been releasing a lot of new things at BackType over the past month; we thought a newsletter would be a great way to keep you up-to-date. Here’s what we’ve been up to:

FriendFeed

We’re proud to announce that BackType has been added as an official service on FriendFeed. Now you can easily add all of the comments you write to your FriendFeed account – it will work even if you’ve already added Disqus and Intense Debate, so no need to remove those.

Alerts

BackType Alerts sends you an e-mail update (immediately, or in daily or weekly digests) whenever a subscribed search term is mentioned in a comment. You can also monitor your alerts via RSS or through the alerts tab in your BackType Dashboard. Think Google Alerts for comments.

Twitter

Lots of people have discovered BackType through Twitter; in fact, we have our own account @backtype that we like to use to get feedback and help you out when things go wrong. So we thought Twitter would be a great place to share the comments you write. Now you can setup auto-posting to Twitter in daily or weekly digests. You can also tweet any comment individually – just click the tweet link beneath the comment.

Widgets

Several people have been asking for a way to display their latest comments on their blog, so we released three widgets – to display your comments, your shared comments and search results, respectively. All widgets are stretch-to-fit, designed to fit in the sidebar of a blog. Try them on your blog and let us know what you think.

Developers

We’ve released a comprehensive API so developers can leverage our data set; in fact, there are already developers building applications with it. If you’re working on something cool, we’d love to hear from you.

Trends

We’ve been noticing some interesting statistics and trends with comments and comment behavior that we wanted to share. So one night we decided to build a small application called BackType Trends to demonstrate – and we made it available for developers to explore via our API. BackType Trends lets you graph mentions of keywords and topics made in millions of comments.

As I said at the beginning of this post, BackType was already one of my favourite social media apps. With these new additions to its service, maybe it will become one of yours too.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment and subscribe to my RSS feed or via email to ensure you can enjoy the latest post(s).

Social Media Application BackType Announces New Upgrades originally appeared on Danny Brown - under a Creative Commons license.