This morning I did a quick scan through the RSS feed headlines and didn’t find much I was interested in (imagine that, 200+ feeds and nothing immediately seized me and said: you must blog about this!), so I switched gears and started thinking about the tools used for blogging. And did some searching around at tools I haven’t used before.

I’ve heard good things about ecto in a number of camps and most recently Leo Laporte has sung ecto praises. Personally, I’ve never tried out ecto before, but it looks reasonably priced and seems to offer some good Mac features and Windows features for bloggers in preparing their posts offline. My usual blogging MO is to read through the RSS feeds — the headlines mostly — and if the headlines are compelling, check into the actual blog entry. This makes it easy to quickly scan through a ton of headlines from many different sources. If I click down deeper and the blog entry motivates me somewhat, then I might leave a comment. If the subject and/or point of view really interests me and I have a lot to say that somebody else in the comment section hasn’t already said better, then I’ll blog about it right then and there. If it’s something I’d like to blog about but don’t have the time then I save the post in a browser bookmark folder called unsurprisingly: “blog about this” with an intention to come back later when I’d like to blog about something but am not sure what to write about.

So, anyway, at ecto I came across the poll which I have shown a screenshot of in this post. I put a green checkmark next to the blogging systems I’ve actually used for blogging which includes Pivot as the Other category, Wordpress, Radio Userland, pMachine, Movable Type and Blogger. The ones I use most are Pivot, Wordpress and Blogger in that order. I only use Movable Type (MT) in one place (a group blog that I particpate to). Never used Typepad to blog, but I’ve left comments on several Typepad blogs. Most of the others I’m sure I’ve seen in some form or another, but never considered actually using them. The voting percentages I found particularly interesting. I realize it’s only 597 votes and not a totally reliable poll, but the numbers seem to pan out about the way I would expect them to with Six Apart holding a lead over Wordpress (23%) when combining MT and Typepad (34%). For bloggers reading this that haven’t tried some of these more popular systems, this poll might give you some ideas. Just google the names with “blog” added after them to find out more.

• Bloghosts bloggers needing a new home
• Can’t post comments on my own TypePad blog!
• Rejected: Adsense RSS public beta already full?
• Pivot starts supporting plugins, sort of
• Pivot blog system makes rel=nofollow an OPTION
• Pivot 1.10 Trackback(X) hack — how to display the number of trackbacks