This is Part Two of a mini-series on microblogging services such as Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce. You can read Part One here.

I promised you yesterday that I’d continue to discuss microblogging services in today’s post, and in particular, to show you how I use them to promote my own content and that of other bloggers.

First, let me tell you how I’m not doing it: I’m not typing my updates manually at both Twitter and Jaiku. That would be much too much work. It would almost be a full time job. Instead, what I do is to let the functionality of Web 2.0 do the work for me. I harness the power of feeds to do the foot work, while I go on about my regular day.

When it comes to my own content, I have my blog feed, my photos feed, and my videos feed. And when it comes to promoting the content I find on other blogs or websites, I use my Google Reader Share Items feed, and my del.icio.us feed. If it’s a blog post or a website that offers a feed, I’ll share it from Google Reader, and if it’s another website or web resources, I’ll tag it with del.icio.us. Between all of my feeds, I pretty much capture all of the interesting content that I or or other people create (well, at least the stuff I find interesting), and get to share it easily with others.

Jaiku itself offers a nice feed aggregation service, where I can point it to the feeds I want, and it’ll display the feed items on my Jaiku page. There’s no limit (to my knowledge) on the number of feeds displayed. I like the fact that this service is part of Jaiku’s feature set. There are some things I don’t like about it, and I’ll get to that in a bit. Here’s what my Jaiku feeds page looks like:

When it comes to Twitter, it has no feed aggregation service. As a matter of fact, the only way to get things in there is to type them in manually, but that’s not a lot of fun if you want to share a lot of stuff. (Remember to put that statement in the context of the differences between content creators and content consumers.) But what Twitter does have is a very nice and open API, and that means other people can build great functionality on top of the standard feature set. Wouldn’t you know it, someone went and did just that? I discovered a great service called Twitterfeed, which lets me aggregate my feeds just like Jaiku. Here’s a screenshot from my Twitterfeed page:

As you can see, I’ve set up all of my relevant feeds to feed into my Twitter page, where they get posted very nicely every time my feeds get polled. If you look at my Jaiku and Twitter feeds closely, you’ll see that I have one more feed set up for Twitter — it’s my Jaiku feed. It’s because I use Jaiku primarily these days, and when I do type in a manual update, I don’t want to type it twice, at both Jaiku and Twitter. I publish it once at Jaiku and let Twitter pick it up through Twitterfeed. Works great!

I mentioned a bit back that there are some things I don’t like about Jaiku’s feed aggregation. Here’s the rub: I have no control over how often my feeds get polled, and my feed items get summarized in a single Jaiku instead of being displayed properly as individual items. This means a lot of the content gets lost, because there’s no way to click on each individual items. You can only click on the last item polled from a particular feed. Have a look at the following screenshot from Jaiku to see what I mean:

As you can see from the screenshot, there were 19 new items in my Google Reader Share Items feed, yet only one got displayed. Where did the other 19 items go? They’re somewhere in virtual feed land, but they sure aren’t on my Jaiku page… It’s the same with my del.icio.us bookmarks feed. There were two new items, yet only one got displayed. Twitterfeed’s a lot better in this regard, because I can choose how often my feeds get polled, and because it converts each individual feed item into an individual Twitter. But it’s also got its limitations, because it can only display the last 5 items from a particular feed. So if I have more than 5 items, like I usually do in my Google Reader feed or my Images feed, they don’t all get displayed.

You might think that doesn’t happen very often, but I can read and share a lot of articles in the span of a half hour. Those 19 feed items you see in the screenshot above were shared in the span of 10 minutes, after reading through about 40 blog posts and articles. Plus, when I publish photos, I usually have more than 5. Yet the extra ones don’t show up on either Jaiku or Twitter. So yeah, this happens quite often for me.

At any rate, I can’t complain too much. The functionality offered by Jaiku, Twitter and Twitterfeed is fantastic for my needs. I can keep my various web presences up to date with my activities quite easily, and I can share a lot of interesting content in the process. Whether it’s mine or that of others, doesn’t matter that much to me. The important thing is that useful content gets promoted much faster and easier through feed syndication and the power of microblogging services like Jaiku and Twitter.

I hope you found this useful!