David Cohn is the founder of Spot.Us, a nonprofit project trying to pioneer “community funded reporting.” He believes in the future beatbloggers could be  funding through small donations from readers and hopes to write about that for BeatBlogging.org in the future.

When I was working on Beat Blogging and the original batch of 13 guinea pig reporters one piece of advice I gave them was to start reading tech bloggers. I stand by that advice.

Not only because every reporter needs to know tools like Twitter, RSS and more — but because tech reporters at VentureBeat, GigaOm and others were already “Beat Blogging.”

They cover technology and then end up using the tools to help aid and abed their reporting. So when I ran into two reporters from ReadWriteWeb, I decided to flip the camera on them and find out what tools they use to make their reporting easier and perhaps more interactive.

Funny enough, it looks as though Jay Rosen also uses the FriendFeed approach.

While neither of these tips relate back to the interactivity of a beat blog – you can start to see how these reporters use technology to enable their reporting. These aren’t just social networks – they are tools!

What tools do you use to listen? RSS, FriendFeed, Technorati?
What tools do you use to talk? Twitter, blogs, YouTube?
What tools do you use to collaborate? Wikis, polls?