If you are stumped for something to write about, and you have either an iPad, iPhone, or an Android device, this online service might prove helpful.

I’d recommend installing Zite, which presents news in various categories, and updates it on a regular basis. You get to select a number of categories from a large  pre-defined range. You can “tell” Zite if you like an article, so that it starts to learn your tastes and serves up articles of increasing appropriateness. This seems to work quite well.

Occasionally I have used an article from Zite as a starting point for my own article, which is why I’d recommend it for Writer’s Block. At the very least, it will provide you with blogs, websites and people you may not otherwise have come across.

My only slight gripe is that there seems to be no way of preventing it from updating itself, so if you are in the middle of reading an article and have to break off from it I suggest sharing it in some way, eg by emailing the link to yourself or viewing it in your web browser and then bookmarking the page.

But on the whole Zite is pretty good, and it’s free.