pcmag.com has an article written long back about blog tools. This article nicely illustrates the various components of a blog. In addition to what a given blogging site provides as the available tools, there are a few very useful external tools that can be linked into an existing blog. These tools are
statcounter.com provides statistics for your blog to find out how many visitors are viewing your blog, where they come from etc. Registration required.
prchecker.info provides your blog's Google PageRank. No registration required.
tocloud.com converts your blog page into a keyword cloud. No registration required.
feedburner.com takes your blog feeds and makes it avaialble to a wider audience. Their terminology, user interface and features seems to be a bit complicated to the novice users. Registration required.
