I love a good blog thing. By thing I mean tool, widget, add-on, whatever. Disqus is a good tool thing indeed. With RSS readers being very available, and me using (my personal favorite) FriendFeed to check out blog and micro-blog RSS feeds from people I know… Disqus seemed like a natural adoption for me… Thus, I’ve installed it on both Sociosophy and my personal blog, and LOVE IT ALREADY!

Comment replies, little avatars, and feed feeding awesomes, all rolled up in to a super simple install. How can you go wrong?

Bloggers, especially those savvy in the world of FriendFeed (or SocialThing, or Tabber, or MyBlogLog, or… wherever else you aggregate) should grab this add-on, pet it, stroke it, make it happy… and it’ll return the favor in form of awesome all over your blog. It’s good times for sure… Here’s a poach from their About page:

Disqus launched into public beta on Halloween 2007. Since then, Disqus has grown to power the discussion on more than 4,000 blogs, newspapers, and websites.

I’ve always been a fan of early adoption, and though I’m well beyond “early”, by comparison with the gazillions of blogs that don’t have Disqus? I feel like one of the cool kids… You should too. Go get it.

I thank Dan at Thaumatocracy for introducing me to awesome geeky blogs, among tons of other awesome geeky things… And after about a year of my informal introductions to these buckets of tasty, knowledge-filled, sugary awesomeness, I feel as it is my civic duty to provide Sociosophy readers the chance to share in these marvels, if by some act of God or other deity-like miracle you managed to find my site before any of these:

7. Techcrunch: I’ve written about it, and damn it! I said nice things. Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about just … everything can be found on Techcrunch, if it has to deal with Tech Industry news that is.

6. Engadget: If there’s a gadget, its on Engadget… and if that’s not their slogan, it totally should be.

5. Drudge Report: A down right bad-ass portal to tons of news. There’s more to the world than the web… I’m not kidding… Stop looking at me like that o_O

4. Kotaku: First off, if you own a PC and don’t game on it, you’re weird. Secondly, if you do game, either on your PC, PS#, Wii, or that Microsoft Console, and don’t read Kotaku? You’re even weirder.

3. Download Squad: In a word? Frigginawesomesite. (So I cheated, sue me)

2. Boing Boing: This blog is simply brilliant. The writers are obviously intelligent, their sources are “many”, and the content always has that new-car smell.

1. Life Hacker: This was an easy #1 pick; and for the gazillion people that read it probably saw this one comin… Hell even if you catch the wind right on a Sunday, you can sense how awesome this site is.

For all things geek, tech, and ninja; head to Thaumatocracy, a blog from Dan Tentler, San Diego BarCamp organizer, photographer, business owner (Aten Syndicate/Photography), and friend of Sociosophy’s author (that’s me).

To be up on current affairs; he was recently interviewed by Wired.com for his exemplary reporting skills of the San Diego fires via Twitter and Flickr, as well as his own blog. As ninjas do, Tentler stayed within the evac zone to report on the happenings of the fire, as well as performing fire watches for home owners, doing journalistic photography of the devastation, and keeping all of us not at ground zero in the loop.

Normally, Thaumatocracy is filled with “linky posts” of web findings of the obscure and interesting; as well as the down right awesome, and provides an inclusive means to stay on top of the Internet pop-culture.

If there was ever a Nobel Prize for dedication and hard work at bringing geeks together, they would have to name it after Crystal Williams of Clever, Clever Girl. Her blog posts about BarCamp and DrupalCamp, along with her awesomeness when it comes to organizing BarCampLA and DrupalCampLA, as well as … believe it or not, friggin BarCamp Shanghai, BarCamp Vancouver, and DrupalCamp Seattle! This girl needs her own private jet.

Check these posts out, if you - somehow - missed them already:

• Ten Steps to Organizing a Barcamp
• Trolls, Stalkers, and BarCamps - How to Deal
• About Crystal

Her coveted 10 steps blog post has been read by lord knows how many, referenced by countless others, translated into other languages, and I even think it’s been printed into the holy book for the Church of BarCamp and Latter Day Geeks… Anyways, knowing Crystal and all the things she does is just mind melting, and coming from me? For those of you that know me, that says a whole hell of a lot.

So here’s a hat’s off to Ms. Williams for doing a stand-up job all around with… EVERYTHING.

Is there anything cooler for a blogger? MyBlogLog is an awesome utility that features real time stats, an intuitive community interface for gathering contacts and joining blog-groups, messaging for those of you who need yet ANOTHER way to be contacted on the web, and it integrates with Flickr. Sometimes, I ♥ Yahoo!… but only sometimes.

As you may guess, this site is run by Yahoo! and among their gazillion other projects, I do believe this one to be the most useful - then again, I am quite biased, duh.

So, who can use such a thing? Bloggers, of course. I’m not really sure if this applies to anyone else - I mean, there is Twitter integration, which I don’t find useful at all, but other than that? It’s .. well… marketing toward people with a blog. Besides, who doesn’t have a blog these days? (pssst - go get one WordPress).

Another tool that appears to be kick ass for us blogger types is BlogBurst. This is an invitation only site that syndicates others who are part of the community, post content relative to your blog’s posts, and then displays the RSS summary of those posts in a widget you place on your site.

The result? Traffic, traffic, traffic. Writing online is happening for pretty much one reason only… to be read. So, the required element? Readers… Sociosophy is getting there, slowly, but surely - and in due time, we’ll even have a subscriber or two! Hopefully with a little help from BlogBurst, if they accept my request for an invite. </shameless plea>