While your chosen platform should be able to handle the daily ins and outs of blogging easily and quickly if you are going to spend any time in this business sub culture there are certain tools that are a must.

These are things that you need to have.

I have not always specified a particular program as not only will your needs differ to mine but so will your budget. What I have done is outline what he tools need to do. I have in places offered guidance as to what you might consider.

Domain Name: You need your own domain, or a sub-domain of your company. If you are promoting example.com but your blog is example123.blogspot.com what does that say about your ability to set up a simple blog? At the very least you should be blog.example.com or example.com/blog (not as nice).

Browser: Which let's face it is Mozilla Firefox these days. Ideally you want to have the Opera and IE tab plugins so you can see your blog rendered in three different browsers. Check this regularly.

WYSIWYG Editor: (or text based for advanced users) a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) blog editor software that allows you to post to post to any platform with a known API is going to save you a lot of time. It would be ideal if the API supported by your editor match the API offered by your blog. Being able to save a draft for" editing tomorrow" is a nice bonus but most platforms allow posts to be added as drafts so don't worry about it too much.

Desktop Feed Reader: (If you have a palm top of PPC then a read for that too). By the time you come to be monitoring 50 blogs on a daily basis you will not have time to visit them all. This is where the feed reader comes in. A good desk top feed reader should take all your blogs and mush them into a giant super blog. Advanced features such as filtering for topic, tag or size are good as is headline only view. Then you pick just the topics that you wish to read. As your collection grows be sure your reader can grow with it.

Advanced Screen capture software: Pressing PrtSrc is OK but something a bit more helpful under the bonnet could be your best buddy if you want to talk about other sites. It's OK if you take one screen shot in every six month period but what if you want to talk about other peoples design changes or publish visually appealing how to guides?

Quality Image Editor: The Gimp is good although some commercial software might suit your needs better. If you are going to play with screen shots or post images you need to be able to crop, resize and convert freely between formats. You should also be sure that you understand the pros and cons of the following formats GIF, JPEG (jpg), PNG and BMP. All formats are not equal.

Organisation Software: Thoughts and notes organisation, be that David Allen’s "Getting Things Done" or Tony Buzan's "Mind Mapping" - pick your style and run with it. You need somewhere to organise things and ideally your notes, ideas, URLs, to-do list, questions and jottings all need to tie into this.

IM: An all in one Instant Messenger (like Trillian or GAIM) is something of a must as bloggers often like to use such systems to chat. You should be able to use a number of the popular channels (YIM, AIM & MSN) without opening six different programs. As it is Skype will need to be running on top of everything else if you need to use it to chat.

eMail: Full featured and web based email if you move about or a full-on desktop system with both server and client side spam protection. I recommend Spam Assasin on your server and ThunderBird plus plugins on your desktop. If you have not got the resources to run email on your blog's domain you might try Gmail which most people will not think unprofessional but you must consider the image you are sending.

Extras: You might want to make sure you have a copy of Open Office 2, a PDF reader and light but good media player sch as VLC. You will want these because they will enable you to open and access files in all the different formats you might get them. Open Office trumps MS Office as it can handle open document formats natively and will impress the geeks and technically minded types if you can demonstrate that you are not reliant on a single company (Microsoft in this case) for your data.