To make things easier for fellow OWS bloggers to get their blogs working well with social media, increasing readership and spam free comment moderation, the Fiber Arts group has partnered with TechOps to install three new plugins that will make your blog more user friendly and easier to manage.  Check these out:

ShareThis is a handy little plugin that helps you share on Twitter, Facebook and over 120 other social networking sites from just a few simple buttons. Now, no more need to add a button for every site you want and clutter up your posts. ShareThis is more simple than the ‘really simple’ plugin and it’s elegant by design. And the 120 other sites it connects to? Just remember that in China, Facebook is not #1, Baidu is – so if you want people all over the world to share your stuff, this gives them a way to do that. See it in action at the bottom of this post.

Disqus is a comment moderation system that is lightweight, elegant and prevents spam from ever entering your mailbox. No need to enable Akismet with the WordPress comment system and Disqus gives you lovely charts, graphs and easy comment sharing on FB & Twitter. To eliminate spam Disqus does a commenter vetting that requires human interaction (capcha) so bots can’t touch you. Give us a comment here and see how it works – but say something nice because Disqus also gives blog moderators the option to edit or mark comments as spam and ban the sender forever. You can even use it on your mother-in-law.

Outbrain is a plugin that provides your readers with more suggestions for further reading at the end of every one of your posts. Whether from your blog, or others, Outbrain scans and matches keywords, tags and categories to make intelligent recommendations to your readers on similar subject matter – and it does it with picture thumbnails and headlines to make those suggestions really sexy. In short, Outbrain helps to increase the amount of time your readers spend with your content, thereby getting your message across by cross-selling it. See it below.

Give these plugins a try. Our thanks go out to Drew, Jake and Pea at TechOps for helping us get these up on our site and available to all other OWS blogs as we speak. And you thought #OWS Fiber Arts was just for knitting wool? Try these fiber optic mittens on for size.