One of the most useful WordPress plugins I have installed on my blogs is Chat Catcher by Shannon Whitley.

What it does is connect comments made on Twitter that reference content in your blog, and links those comments to your content by placing a reference to a particular tweet in a post it mentions, as indicated in the screenshot.

In addition to the WordPress plugin, Chat Catcher works on any blog via a PHP script you can get from the Chat Catcher website. There’s also a module for Drupal.

However, Chat Catcher became a victim of its own success when, earlier this month, Shannon announced that he didn’t have the resources to keep up with it any longer and so could no longer continue supporting it.

Happily, others believed it was worth supporting as Shannon noted in an announcement email last Thursday.

Community spirit in action.

Even better news from Shannon over the weekend shows that Chat Catcher is here to stay:

Chat Catcher is pleased to announce the completion of an investment round with Ocasta Labs, an early stage technology investment group. Ocasta Labs have injected both funds and resources to extend the Chat Catcher team and to accelerate development of the service.

Terrific and many congrats, Shannon!