ReadWriteWeb

This morning, Parse.ly launched Dash, a content management system smart enough to make a blogger weep with joy. It analyzes the Web to show publishers what's hot. It tracks trends within the site, revealing what works for the audience. It points out when old posts are getting popular again. It follows individual authors over time and shows how their coverage performs. It shows where traffic is coming from to improve targeting. In short, it helps publishers plan.

It does all of this by analyzing the billions of page views it tracks anonymously across its whole user base. Parse.ly started as a feed reader for pros in 2009, and Dash expands its capabilities with predictive analytics for one's own site. The software gets a sense of what topics and stories are most important and whether they're trending up or down. That's a great thing for publishers. Is it good for readers? I can't wait to find out.

I just fell in love with Calepin. It's a blogging tool that gives you an instant, minimal website using two of geeks' favorite little helpers: Dropbox and Markdown. It is nerdy, but only a little bit, and I'll talk you through the whole thing. By the end of this short tutorial, I bet you'll want one.

First, you need an account. Go to Calepin.co and register your user name. It's early; you can probably get whatever you want. Next, log in with Dropbox. Calepin will create a folder in your Dropbox that it will watch for text files written in Markdown. When you click the big 'Publish' button on the Calepin site, it will publish all the documents as a blog at [user name].calepin.co. Here's mine, for example. The blog's appearance is spare and relaxing. It's a great place to just stick your thoughts up on the Web. Don't know what a Dropbox or a Markdown is? Don't worry. You'll quickly get the gist.

Jux, the boldest, loudest big-screen personal publishing platform around, has just made its natural leap to the iPad. As of today, the multimedia publishing platform that launched in August now supports touch-powered browsing. It's iPad-optimized, but all it needs is a tablet browser. Just go to jux.com and dive in.

When I covered Jux's desktop launch, I called it "post-blogging." I intended some irony then, but now that I've touched Jux on an iPad, I take it seriously. Very seriously. The experience is continuous between the desktop and the tablet. For all its media-heavy intensity, Jux is a responsive design. This is no boring WordPress Onswipe theme for a blog. This is the publisher coming to life through every screen.

WordPress has made a pair of announcements today focusing on reading rather than writing. Free WordPress.com sites now have a "small, cute, little" follow button in the bottom right corner for readers who are not logged into WordPress. This allows non-WordPress users to follow the blog by email. (Yes, disgruntled blogger, you can turn it off.)

In another announcement for Android users, WordPress for Android 1.5 is now available, and its major new feature is a blog reader for the WordPress blogs you follow. You can even follow non-WordPress blogs using RSS.

Posterous, the niftiest self-publishing platform you've never used, just rolled out a whole new metaphor for the service called Posterous Spaces. What Posterous - and any other apparent blogging service, for that matter - used to call 'sites' are now called spaces. Spaces allow you to publish content to selected audiences. That's right; Posterous Spaces are no longer to be thought of as simply "blogs" or what-have-you. They're gunning for Google Plus and Facebook now.

The Posterous iPhone app has been updated to incorporate spaces, but the announcement doesn't mention the Android app. Posterous has also improved ways of finding and following spaces, adding a 'Popular' tab for real-time highlights from around Posterous and an 'Activity' tab showing likes, comments, follows and such from your spaces and those you follow.

Google has just announced a new iPhone app for Blogger, its pioneering free blog platform. Though quite orange, the interface is clean and native-looking, and it allows publishing, drafting and editing of blog posts while on the go.

The app doesn't offer a full-fledged blog post editor, but instead it offers simple photo uploading, tagging and location services, concentrating on features that complement mobile blogging. Its features are comparable to the Android app, which went live in February. The previous iPhone client for Blogger was built by a third party.

WordPress has revamped the WordPress.com Comments panel in Site Stats to give blog authors better insight into their most responsive readers. In addition to a summary of recent comments, the panel now displays leader boards for top commenters and most commented posts. For quieter blogs, the leader boards show all-time stats, but for active blogs, they cover the last three months of activity.

The blog provider has also announced two new third-party apps for WordPress.com blogs to make them more social and shareable. Feedfabrik now allows WordPress.com users to turn their blogs into books, both in PDF and physical formats (and there's currently a 10% discount offer). Empire Avenue, the free "Social Stock Market" game, has also announced WordPress integration, allowing WordPress bloggers to incorporate their blogging influence into their share price.

Today, a NYC-based startup called Jux has launched a personal publishing platform that kicks a field goal right over the heads of Tumblr and the post-blogging crowd. It's a big, beautiful, dynamic tool full of splashy images and sharp Web fonts. It offers six kinds of basic posts: BlockQuote, Article, Photo, Video, SlideShow, and CountDown. You start from there and build huge, full-screen posts that suck the viewer in. It's like a blog that can crank out whole About.me or Flavors.me pages for every post. You have to see it to get how powerful it is.

Power, of course, is not everything when it comes to publishing. Jux isn't lean like Posterous or clean like WordPress, whose publishing platform powers nearly 15% of the world's websites. Compared to blog posts that feel more like pages, a Jux post is more like a Times Square billboard. It takes some time to load. There's an animated loading bar between screens, especially when editing. But it's worth the wait. Perusing a Jux profile is like taking a deep dive into someone's ideas.

Many of the top investors in the tech industry are also prolific bloggers, offering their insights on investment and technology trends. So if you're looking for a list of the best - or at least the most trafficked, then you're in luck. As Marshall Kirkpatrick noted in a story about what the best-of-the-blogging venture capitalists love, VC Larry Cheng has posted his 4th annual Venture Capitalist Blog Index.

The index ranks the top blogs written by venture capitalists, using data from Compete and the blogs' average monthly uniques from the fourth quarter of 2010.

Even if you're not quite ready to show the public your product, you can still create a good website and a solid online presence for your startup. I want to sidestep the argument about whether or not it's good to be "stealth" or not, and work with the assumption that if you've purchased the domain name, you're going to put up some sort of website.

So here are a few of the things you should consider when building your startup's site: