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There's been a lot of grumbling about FeedBurner lately. The service, which provides statistics and ad injections for website feeds, was purchased back in mid-2007 by Google. After about a year of mostly ignoring the service, Google finally began integrating it with the rest of their other services. And here's where the trouble begins.

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Launched just a day ago was Plinky, a service that bills itself as "a service that makes it easy for you to create inspired content". I heard about it on FriendFeed, and based on the promotion of the service, believed it to be a tool for helping bloggers with writer's block. Obviously, I signed up within minutes of its official launch.

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There's a bit of a row going on at the moment, thanks to Robert Scoble and Steve Rubel, about whether text or video is king of the internet. Guys, the answer isn't one or the other. It comes back down to who you want to see it.

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Dan Zarrella, the social media pro who created Tweetbacks, released yesterday a new Wordpress module which encompasses Tweetbacks and even more Twitter functionality for blogs. Called TweetSuite, this add-on brings in things such as a "ReTweet This" button for each post in the Tweetback list, as well as a Digg-style badge for blog entries.

So now, I'll have to add all these features to the Drupal Tweetbacks module.

One of the TweetSuite functions I won't have to implement, however. The Twitter module for Drupal already handles sending out a tweet whenever you create new content on a site, so anyone wanting that can use that module instead.

I just put out a new version of the Tweetbacks module I put online on Friday. The download URL is now <http://drupal.org/node/357978/release>. This new version includes support for all of the options for Dan Zarrella's Tweetbacks system, although described in slightly different terms.

Download it, and have fun!

UPDATE: Tweetbacks is now on drupal.org! It will be a little while before builds start appearing but from now on, project development will happen there. If you are interested in helping me maintain this module, let me know. Also, there are a couple little bugs in the version currently available on this site. Please wait for the fresh drupal.org build to show up; when that happens I'll be taking down the file from here.

UPDATE 2: Builds are now appearing on Drupal.org. I've removed the download from here, so you'll want to go to the actual project page from now on.

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Back on Sunday, Mashable put out a list of predictions on how Twitter would change blogging in 2009. The first prediction in their list was "tweetbacks", or a way of showing tweets that reference a particular blog article. Well, not two days later did someone actually create them. Social media pro Dan Zarrella whipped up a Tweetbacks system that went live on Tuesday, followed by an update on Thursday.

I'm not a professional blogger. It would be nice, but with my plodding pace of posting (and the miserable income I get from ads — been on AdSense since 2007 and still haven't made even $10) it's not happening.

Anyone who follows my blog knows how sporadic it is. Sometimes I can go a week (or more) without posting anything; other times, I might shoot off five posts, rapid-fire. Obviously, I need to set some kind of blogging regimen for myself, to ensure that I not only keep posting, but that I provide interesting content that'll keep you coming back for more.

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For about a month and a half now, I’ve been using a service called Zemanta to help improve the quality of my blog posts. While I had a lot of complaints about the service back at the beginning, the team of developers responsible have been hard at work improving things, and providing a first rate blogging tool. There’s still research to be done and bug fixes to be run, but my old, somewhat negative comments about Zemanta are no longer valid.

Update: This is not the article you're looking for. While my points were valid when I originally wrote the article, today, Zemanta provides a great service, which works well and continues to expand. If you want my opinion, I'd say use it!

You might have noticed recently, that I’ve been giving Zemanta a try. It’s a pretty interesting service, and when it works, it’s great! Unfortunately, at least for me it doesn’t tend to work.