Occasionally, I have the good fortune of finding tools that truly simplify my life. I waste away the other twenty-some-odd hours of the day playing with the non-productive tools. It is a sick cycle, but there is a balance in there somewhere.

When writing a blog post and taking a few screen captures the captures, file save, upload process can be cumbersome and time consuming. Enter Jing, which is available for Windows or Mac.

1. Enter a keyboard shortcut to start the screen clipping service. For the mac, I am using Command+Shift+1. The crosshairs appear, and you can select portions of the screen, whole windows, or the whole desktop – basic screen capture stuff.

2. After selecting the image, you can add some basic markup (lines or text) to the image through the tools panel.

3. This is where the magic happens. After naming the file, you can upload to Flickr, or to your FTP location for insertion into your post. HOLY COW–You have just saved so much time!

Yes there may be other screen capture to FTP programs out there, like GrabUp, but Jing also includes the ability to create screencasts and post to YouTube, Screencast.com or import into Camtasia for editing.

You can download a free version of the software here (mac or PC). Or you can “go pro” for $14.95/year, which enables more options for image and video formats.

Paul Boutin’s recent Wired article, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004, suggests that the blogosphere is  too crowded for a lone blogger to make a difference, and it it time to fold up shop on blogging:

Writing a weblog today isn’t the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

I thought I would post a blog about it, and I hope that it draws more comments than those haranguing hecklers Paul references. In many ways, I tend to agree that microblogging and many 2.0 apps have changed the face of the personal publication model. To me, all of these tools become facets of my online persona, but the blog is central to this online presence.

Although it is possible to have superintegration across blog/facebook/twitter/freiendfeed/linkedin/youtube/flickr/etc., each of these personal promotion channels, have seperate communities (despite the crossover). After feeding tweets to Facebook for some period, it became clear that my tweetquency was too high for my conversation to be meaningful to Facebook friends. For me, the blog becomes the central hub of my online persona to all of the spokes (or channels) of social media.

Many activities that were formerly blog content now appear as tweets.  I write blog posts once or twice a week as opposed to once or twice a day, but I am actually publishing/retweeting/linking more content than ever before. Tweets are pithy. They may even have misspellings or ramblings. They generally are not thoughtful and well edited like blogs. However, with my posts, I try to think before I type. Therefore, blogs become more informational, reflective commentary, and the more pedestrian commentary happens in these other outlets.

Despite this Zarathustrian proclamation, blogs aren’t dead, and we didn’t kill them–at least not in 2008.