Archive for the ‘Cool Web Tools’ Category
20+ Cool Social Media and Web Tools
Wednesday, September 15th, 2010Looking for a way to monitor social media activities and results on a tight budget? Want to show the world how social you are with a cool widget on your website or blog? How about a real-time search tool to see what’s being said about your company or any topic of interest right now? Interested in an easy way to stay current on key Google Analytics traffic stats from your desktop? Need a way to edit video and photos without the expense and overhead of a pricey editing application?
You’ll find all of this and more in this collection of tools and reviews of some of the coolest free or low-cost social media monitoring and web tools so far this year.
Cool Web Tools
Social Mention
***** 5 stars
A powerful real-time social search engine that not only displays results for a specified term or phrase, but lets you filter results by source (e.g., blogs, microblogging sites, social bookmarking, images, video), and shows associated metrics like sentiment, top keywords, top users (who’s talking about this topic most actively) and sources. You can narrow search results to a specific timeframe and sort by date or source. Social Mention also lets you set up alerts (simiar to Google Alerts) and offers a widget that can be installed on a website or blog to display the real-time buzz about your specified topic.
A social media monitoring tool that combines powerful features (e.g., historical and real-time data, sentiment analysis, platform filtering) and ease of use with a more attractive monthly price than many well-known competitors.
A quick and handy way to get a snapshot of the “social media rank” of any website. Metrics include traffic stats from Alexa, Compete and Quantcast; backlinks and results by search engine; backlinks and mentions on the major social news sites and more.
A cool, free blog widget that automatically displays links, along with thumbnail images, to related posts on your blog at the bottom of each blog post you publish. Visitors can rate posts and you also get click statistics. It takes a bit longer to install than they claim but isn’t terribly difficult.
A dead-simple to use Twitter monitoring dashboard; keep tabs on tweets for three phrases, hash tags or Twitter handles. Monitoring can be filtered by location as well.
A real-time search engine that displays results from blog posts, articles, blog comments, microblogging sites (e.g., Twitter) and social content sharing sites.
An online video editor than enables you to mix videos footage, images and soundtracks and add effects to create standard or high-definition online videos. Your first video is free. After that, their standard pricing model is designed for high-volume production but plans are available for less frequent use as well.
***** 5 Stars
Want a quick snapshot of how your website—or any number of websites you track through Google Analytics—is performing? Now there’s no need to log in to GA just for a simple check. Polaris is a slick, free Adobe Air-based desktop tool that displays eight GA charts at a glance, including the dashboard, traffic sources, top content, keywords and goal values.
Do you really love a particular topic, company, website or public figure? Or really hate one? Care what others think? This is the site for you. Amplicate is a user-driven site that shows you at a glance how many people love or hate any of thousands of different entities across dozens of categories. For example, (at last check) in the social networks category, three times as many (67 to 22) people loved ecademy as hated it, while more than twice as many (18,163 to 8,632) hated Facebook as loved it (not that Zuckerberg is terribly worried). Joe Biden gets 86% love, but Barack Obama only 48%. Okay, so it may not be scientific, but it is fascinating.
Twitter saves “only” your last 3,200 tweets. For those who feel they really need to hang on to more than that, BackUpMyTweets offers a free service to save all their snippets of 140-character brilliance. The site also offers tools for backing up web mail accounts, blogs and online photos.
Reviews of More Cool Tools
5 PowerPoint Search Engines To Seek Out Publicly Available Presentations by Carpe Diem
According to some estimates, there may be as many as 50 million PowerPoint presentations publicly available on the web. But searching for them can be a pain. Sure you can use a general search engine with PPT as a filetype query, but you can save yourself work and typing by utilizing one of these PowerPoint-specific search engines to do the digging.
The 39 Social Media Tools I’ll Use Today by Social Media Today
Jay Baer provides concise reviews of his favorite social media tools for Twitter management, comments, search, photo sharing, analytics, video creation, social media monitoring and more.
Trackur Launches Free Version Of Its Social Media Monitoring Tool by TechCrunch
Robin Wauters reviews Trackur, an online reputation management and social media monitoring tool created by Andy Beal and team. Trackur is sort of Google Alerts on steroids and competes with products like Radian6 and Attentio. This is a slick tool, and my one experience with their support team was impressively brief and helpful.
10 Must-Have Web Apps Every Internet User Would Love To Know by Smashing Apps
Mini-reviews of 10 helpful tools such as WobZIP, an online utility for unzipping files on admin-proteced computers; Mitto, an online password manager; and Web Page to PDF, which is kind of self-explanatory.
10 Free Web-based Alternatives to Photoshop by LifeClever
Chanpory Rith reviews 10 free online tools that offer many of the features of PhotoShop with the high cost or complexity, including Picnik (possibly the best free online photo editor), PhotoShop Express, Snipshot and flauntR.
5 Free B2B Marketing Tools by Modern B2B Marketing
Maria Pergolino of Marketo reviews five popular tools including CoTweet, a Twitter tool that enable users to track keyword or brand mentions and even assign responses to particular individuals (for example, by product line). These are familiar but essential tools for the b2b marketer’s toolbox.
List of Search Engines – Top Search Engines in 2010 by Secret Search Engine Labs
Google may be the 800-pound gorilla of search engines but as this post reminds us, it’s not alone in the jungle. Here you’ll find a alphabetical list of 30+ alternative search engines from Ask and Rich Skrenta’s Blekko to social search engine Stumpedia and “computational knowledge engine” Wolfram Alpha.
Interesting websites to check out by iMedia Connection (video)
Shelly Palmer discusses four tools worth checking out including BugMeNot (for creating website logins that won’t get you spammed) and Phonezoo, a site where you can find and create custom cell phone ringtones.
10 Simple Google Search Tricks by The New York Times
Simon Mackie of GigaOM explains 10 cool little tricks for Google searches including site search, using Google as a calculator, performing currency conversions and finding specific types of documents online.
12 alternatives to Basecamp by Popwuping
Clark MacLeod reviews a dozen alternatives to popular online project management / group collaboration tool Basecamp, such as Huddle, Kindling and Mindquarry.
Best Cool Web Tools of 2009, Part 2
Wednesday, March 17th, 2010Part 1 of the best cool web tools for 2009 presented tools for sharing presentations online, consolidating social networking accounts, generating word-of-mouth referrals and using social media for research. This post includes tools for social search, social media monitoring, Twitter management, competitive research, real-time chat, job hunting, video sharing, time management and more.
Social Media Tools
An extremely cool tool. What Website Grader does for website SEO analysis, HowSociable? does for a brand’s presence in social media: it evaluates a variety of sites to produce a combined “social media presence” score. Even better, it allows you to drill into the social media mentions of a brand behind the metrics.
A real-time social media monitoring platform for PR, marketing, and brand pros. Get real-time alerts, trending and analysis for news, blogs, twitter and more.
Protecting your brand online is critical. This tool lets you instantly search more than 350 social media sites for your brand as a user name, so you can reserve it and keep it out of the hands of competitors, name squatters or potential detractors.
An inexpensive utility that helps efficiently create Twitter lists, find relevant people to follow, identify inactive Twitter followers and more.
CloudProfile: Social Media Optimization for Small Business by Mashable
Mashable reviews CloudProfile, a social profile / SEO / social media monitoring tool for small businesses. Sounds interesting, but is it worth $50 per month?
The Internet more positive about PPC than SEO by Searchcowboys
A review of whatdoestheinternetthink, a social sentiment tool. Enter any term and this tool will show you percentages of positive, negative and “don’t care” social media sentiment regarding the topic or brand.
Own Your Domain Name & Aggregate All of Your Social Accounts with Chi.mp by How-To Geek
A review of Chi.mp, a free service that enables you to register a personal/unique domain name, domain name, then blog, create photo albums, and aggregate all of your social accounts in one place.
Real-Time Chat Tools
A widget that lets you install real-time chat capabilities on any web page.
Olark Is A Dead Simple Chat Widget For Site Owners by TechCrunch
TechCrunch review of Olark, a live chat widget alternative to Meebo.
Enhanced Search Tools
5 Ways to Add a Search Sidebar to Google SERPs by Search Engine Journal
Ann Smarty reviews WebMynd, Unified Search and three other tools that extend the search capabilities of Google in various ways to produce more relevant and/or comprehensive results.
Search Engine LeapFish Merges Real-Time Data And Social Content by MediaPost Online Media Daily
Review of LeapFish, a meta-search engine that combines traditional and real-time results from social media and news sites.
A real-time search tool for discovering current opinion and news coverage of hot topics.
Another real-time search tool.
Google Squared – A Simple Tutorial by SEM Nook
A quick tutorial on how to use Google Squared to get customized, focused search results.
A downloadable tool that helps instantly find sites similar to the one you are currently browsing.
A powerful people search tool for finding online information about individuals.
A human-powered recommendation engine that provides guidance on a wide range of topics and questions, from which computer you should buy to which vegetables are the most nutritious.
Other Cool Web Tools
A tool that allows you to capture and upload video, images, text, files, even an area of your desktop to the web.
An online video distribution and analytics service to promote video content, somewhat along the lines of TubeMogul.
9 new marketing tools you need by iMedia Connection
Doug Schumacher reviews nine cool apps and plugins for marketers, including Skitch (for web page markup), OmniGraffle (diagramming), ColorZilla (online color management for design) and Hootsuite (Twitter management dashboard).
Find Competitor’s Top Performing Keywords & Use Them To Your Advantage by PPC Hero
Tips on how to use Compete.com to find your competitors’ top keywords, site traffic patterns, unique visitors and other information.
A tool that lets you create funky animated movies from a text file.
A tool for creating website favicons, similar to the DeGraeve favicon tool or the Dynamic Drive FavIcon generator.
A URL shortener that enables you to combine multiple URLs into one shortened link for collaboration or sharing.
Job hunting? Indeed instantly searches job sites, newspapers, associations and company career pages for jobs based on title/keywords and location.
100+ Resources for Getting Things Done by Readaloo
A fabulous list of time management apps for calendars, task lists, collaboration, organization, taking notes, bookmarking, mind-mapping and more.
Best Cool Web Tools of 2009, Part 1
Sunday, January 10th, 2010Looking for a more powerful way to share presentations online? Consolidate your online profiles and social networking presence? Create a cool Twiiter background even if you’re not the artistic type? Generate word-of-word referrals? Use social media more effectively for research?
You’ll find tools for all of those tasks and others in this collection of more of the best cool online tools.
SlideSix is a multimedia presentation sharing site, designed to be SlideShare on steroids. You can upload presentations, record audio narration, and attach videos, all on the site. SlideSix lets you upload PowerPoint, PDF or OpenOffice presentations, mix in videos from YouTube or Vimeo, and share your presentations with groups.
PeoplePond is a secure social profile site that can be connected to your Facebook, Twitter and other social media accounts. It’s an important place to have a profile listed for anyone concerned with online reputation management. The creators of PeoplePond more recently also launched CompanyPond, a company profile site that improves online visibility and SEO for corporate sites.
Another service that allows individuals to collect all of their social media profiles in one place, verify their identity, and track activity on those profiles. And, tired of filling out the same information over and over for each new social networking or profile site? DandyID “provides you with a globally recognizable profile that you only need to fill out once. The profile then follows you around the web and automatically appears on DandyID-enabled sites.”
For anyone who wants a cool, custom Twitter background but is design-challenged, My Tweet Space provides a wide selection of free and low-cost professionally designed backgrounds to enhance one’s Twitter presence.
TAF offers free and fee-based tools to help companies capitalize on word-of-mouth (or word-of-web) marketing. Their suite of apps ranges from simple branded buttons to social commerce tools, advertising and social rewards programs.
This is a cool alternative search engine that lets you search Google, Yahoo, Bing and Twitter simultaneously. Great for viewing the differences between “traditional” and real-time search results.
Bing Tips & Tricks by Digitial Inspiration
There have lots of posts written about Google search tricks, but in this piece, Amit Agarwal shows how to perform tasks like tracking companies, finding MP3 files and even setting up an RSS feed of search results (something that can’t be done with Google or Yahoo!) with Bing.
100 Tips and Tools to Research the Social Web by Select Courses
An outstanding list of tips and tools for using social media to conduct both primary and secondary research, monitor trends, create alerts, analyze information and organize your data.
In their own words, Sprout Builder is “a visual authoring studio that allows creative professionals to quickly and easily create branded, rich-media content and widgets.” It enables designers build anything from simple Flash banners to a sophisticated widgets with multiple media types, feeds and sharing options by dragging different media types onto a canvas and controlling effects. Pricing ranges widely from $19 per month for the individual option to $299 per month for the professional version, but there’s a 30-day trial for the curious to try this out.
Flock is a “social web browser” that integrates email, photos, video and social media sites into a single interface, while simplifying sharing and publishing. It runs on Windows, Mac or Linux and supports multiple webmail types (Gmail, AOL, Yahoo! Mail), social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace), blogging platforms (WordPress, Blogger, TypePad), media sites (Flickr, YouTube) and more. It includes features like a People Sidebar for staying in touch with your social connections, an integrated RSS feed reader, blog editor and web clipboard. And it’s free.
Huddle is an online project management, collaboration and file sharing tool along the lines of Basecamp, DeskAway and Projjex. It supports unlimited users, online chat, project alerts, a whiteboard feature, document management (approvals, workflow, audit trails), and collaborative document editing. Pricing ranges from a free, ad-supported version to $200/month for the enterprise package, with the most popular service level at $38 per month.
Customer relationship management (CRM) systems have become ubiquitous, yet many—perhaps even most—implementations fail to take full advantage of the software’s capabilities in one or more areas. Most companies could be getting more benefit from their existing systems, but identifying the problem areas, and what needs to be done to improve use of the software, can involve a long and expensive consulting engagement. This free analysis tool from on-demand CRM consulting firm Demand Chain Systems short-circuits that process, helping to identify the most promising areas for improvement in just 40 minutes.
Jing lets you capture on-screen action or animate still images, add narration, and upload the final video or YouTube or other video-sharing sites or share by email. Available for Windows and Mac, Jing lets you add call-outs to screen captures or images, share your video or output it for further editing in other tools. There’s a free version for casual home users, or a Pro version that adds features like additional output options and webcam capture (Mac OS X Leopard only) available for just $14.95 per year.
Skimmer is a free Adobe AIR desktop application designed to organize your social media activities and make interaction easier by aggregating your friends’ feeds from Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, and Blogger on one screen. It provides instant access to any video linked in a feed post, a slideshow view for Flickr photos or YouTube videos, and the ability to customize your profile and the appearance of your content.
TubeMogul is a free online video tracking and analytics service that provides a single point for uploading to the top video sharing sites, and powerful analytics on who, what, and how videos are being viewed. TubeMogul tracks viewing statistics far beyond “views,” including per-second audience dropoff, audience geography and more. According to their site, “TubeMogul’s analytic technology aggregates video-viewing data from multiple sources to give publishers an improved understanding of when, where and how often their videos are watched, track and compare what’s hot and what’s not, measure the impact of marketing campaigns, gather competitive intelligence, and share the data with colleagues or friends.” There are also fee-based versions that provide more advanced analytics and video promotion features.
Check whether the Twitter conversations about you are positive or negative with twendz by Advocable
Palin Ningthoujam reviews twendz, a free social media tracking and sentiment measurement tool that shows you who is talking about your product or brand (or any other topic) on social media sites, what’s being said, a keyword cloud of the terms most commonly used in the conversations, and the overall tone (negative, positive or neutral) of the conversations. While not as sophisticated as professional monitoring tools, twendz does provide a quick, easy and free snapshot of the content and sentiment around any topic of social media discussion.
Best of 2008: Cool Web Tools
Saturday, December 12th, 2009Originally published on WebMarketCentral between August 2008 and September 2009.
Somewhat similar to tools like Basecamp and Projjex, DeskAway is an online collaboration tool that supports ad hoc work teams by enabling them to manage and track projects, share large files, send secure messages and report on activities. Pricing ranges from free (up to five users and three active projects at a time) to $99 per month for unlimited projects and users.
Gickr is a slick free tool for creating animated GIFs from any collection of photos. It can be used to create banner ads, slide shows or Flash-like animations.
This is a “connected thesaurus” that belongs in every writer’s toolbox. For any word or pair of words, it shows related words, connections between the words, rhyming words and more. For famous names, it can help find information such as occupation, birth and death years, nationality, and “trigger links” (e.g. “Clinton” and “Whitewater”).
OnlyWire lets you automatically submit content to all of your favorite social networking sites with a single button, and makes it easy for your blog readers to bookmark and share your content. If you don’t want to see their ads, a fee-based version is available for a reasonable $25 per year.
16 Essential PC Applications for Bloggers by Problogger
Frequent Best-of contributor Darren Rowse reviews essential blogging tools including SnagIt
64 B2B Marketing Tools and Resources by Modern B2B Marketing
In one of the most underrated posts of last year, Jon Miller provides links to more than 60 tools and information resources including blog posts, white papers, analyst reports, webcasts, podcasts, ebooks and articles on topics ranging from lead scoring and nurturing to marketing ROI and social media tools. Examples include David Raab’s Guide to Demand Generation Systems, Marketo’s Landing Page Test Calculator and this podcast from Laura Ramos on using Web 2.0 tactics to boost b2b marketing results.
9 Google Bookmarklets for SEOs by Search Engine Journal
The indispensable Ann Smarty reviews nine helpful bookmarlets (small tools activated from a button in your browser), such as Search selected text on Google and tools for Google Trends, Google Insights, and Google Blog Search.
While there are lots of website analytics programs out there, Clicky combines powerful functionality with affordable pricing in a way few others can match. Unlike Google Analytics (the application it’s most likely to be compared to), Clicky provides real-time stats, Twitter analytics, separate mobile visitor tracking, visitor details, WordPress integration and more. While their free and blogger plans offer limited funcitonality, their Pro ($60 per year as of this writing), Super Pro ($120/year) and Enterprise ($300/year) plans offer impressive capabilities at very reasonable cost. It’s hard to compete with free, but with all of these features and great value, Clicky has found a way to do it.
Facesaerch (yes, that’s the correct spelling) is just what its name implies: a search engine specifically for faces. Search for your favorite celebrity, a neighbor, your boss, your next prospective employee—anyone whose picture may be somewhere on the internet—to discover what photos of them have been posted and where.
Animoto lets you grab images from your hard drive or the web, choose a soundtrack from your audio collection or theirs, and then automatically creates a cool music video from your selections. While this tool would benefit from more attractive pricing (you can only make 30-second videos for free) and better controls, it’s worth checking out and playing with.
Similar to feedkiller, previously reviewed here, Feedoor.com lets you merge RSS feeds or even individual blog posts into a single feed. You can select how many stories from each source to include, and the tool provides advanced filtering options to include or exclude posts based on keywords, author and date. It also lets you create Javascript widgets for your blog or site that display headlines from your custom feed, and does it all with a simple, straightforward interface.
Crucial Firefox Plugins For SEM Professionals; Put Google To Work To Meet CPA Goals by Search Engine Land
Josh Dreller reviews seventeen helpful Firefox plugins, such as FireFTP (a fully functional and free FTP client that runs within Firefox), FireShot (a free screenshot capture tool with annotation capabilities), SearchStatus (a “Swiss army knife” for SEO pros) and Google Global (lets you search as though you were sitting anywhere in the world).
6 All-in-One Tools for Quick SEO Diagnostics by Search Engine Journal
Prolific SEO blogger Ann Smarty reviews a half-dozen SEO diagnostics tools including Quarkbase (a new addition to my arsenal), HubSpot’s Website Grader (one I use all the time), and Cubestat.
17 Online Free Web Based Applications That You Probably Would Love To Use! by SmashingApps
AN Jay reviews a variety of helpful and cool online tools here, from free web conferencing service Dimdim and URL shortener BudURL to Skydeck (an online tool for keeping track of your cell phone calls and text messages) and PDFescape, a free online PDF reader / editor / form filler and form designer tool.
This is an essential site for personal online reputation management. LookupPage lets you create an optimized personal profile that, in most cases, will show up very highly on the major search engines, helping you to “own” valuable first-search-page real estate for your name. The site offers free listing, as well as couple of affordable fee-based options that provide additional benefits such as an ad-free page and top listing guaranteed.
Another valuable site for reputation management, Retaggr not only enables you to create an online profile linked to your accounts on other social media sites, but also lets you easily create an online business card, social media email signature, and blog widget to help visitors easily add you to their friend lists.
An alternative search engine, Exalead may not be a “Google killer” but does provide some interesting features. The top menu and right sidebar box make it simple to narrow your search to the entire web, just your PC, or Wikipedia, as well as by related terms, site type, media type and other criteria.
Either a slick tool to help generate domain name ideas, check availability and register with just a few clicks, or at least a mildly interesting way to waste some time—you decide.
This is a slick tool that enables you to easily create a graphical HTML social media email signature for use with most common webmail services (Gmail, Yahoo mail, AOL, Hotmail etc.). WiseStamp lets you control the look of the email signature as well as adding RSS feeds and social networking links like LinkedIn and Facebook.
Face to Face video chat by ePoster
Concise review of ooVoo, a free video chat tool that’s been previously written about here. ooVoo is an easy-to-use tool for conducting video chat with anyone who has a webcam.
14 Tools to Legally Spy On Your Competition by FutureNow
The brilliant Bryan Eisenberg details more than a dozen tools to help compare or benchmark your site/blog against competitors, including Feed Compare (compare the size of your RSS subscriber base to others), Xinu Returns (shows how your site compares to others on search engines and social bookmarking sites) and Website Grader (provides an overall score for the SEO quality of your site plus competitive comparisons and recommendations for improvement).
The Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites by PC Magazine
Finally, Kyle Monson reviews a slew of useful and/or entertaining online tools such as Animoto (automatically creates videos from uploaded music and photos), Jott (a cool and handy speech-to-text conversion tool) and, for researchers, NationMaster, a site which lets you compare countries on a wide variety of statistics ranging from the serious (economic measures, terrorism) to the trivial (softdrink consumption).
Surf Canyon is a broswer plugin for Firefox and IE that refines results as you search, helping to make them more relevant so you can find exactly what you’re looking for more quickly. Pandia’s review of how Surf Canyon personalizes search results states that “SurfCanyon accelerates the search process by re-ranking the search results based on your behaviour…Even though there’s no actual magic involved, this nifty little app does a great job of digging though the search results for the hits you need, even though Google buried them on page 12.”
In the same realm as Basecamp from 37signals, Projjex is an online project collaboration tool that lets you define groups, upload and share files, schedule meetings, assign tasks and send automated reminders. Projjex extends this functionality with cool, practical features like file tagging to simplify search, time tracking and iPhone integration. Serious users will eventually want to upgrade to the fee-based service, but the free offering is robust enough to be helpful tool for small businesses while providing larger organizations with a realistic trial before buying.
Follow me on Twitter badges / logos / buttons by limeshot marketing
Lots of bloggers are adding Twitter follow-me buttons and badges to their blogs, but thanks to limeshot, you no longer have to limit yourself to standard light-blue-and-white graphic. Here are 36 variations for a follow-me badge that reflects your color scheme and personality.
feedkiller is an rss mixing tool that lets you combine a variety of content into your website or favorite rss aggregator with a single rss feed. It’s free and very simple to set up. MakeUseOf.com notes in its review of feedkiller that “other tools can be used for that purpose (such as) RSS Mixer, Feedoor and FeedBlendr. However what makes FeedKiller standout is the ability to select the number of stories to include from each feed.” What would make it stand out even more is a simple PHP script for including the resulting feed on a website.
SearchCloud is a powerful search tool to use for multi-term, detailed searches. Any search engine will let you use multiple search words of course, but SearchCloud takes that a step further by letting you select a size for each search word or phrase, indicating its relative importance. And on the off-chance that SearchCloud isn’t intuitive enough for you, they even provide a one-minute video on how to use it
ScribeFire offers a Firfox browser plugin that lets bloggers drag and drop formatted text from the web into their blogs, post entries, take notes, categorize and tag their blog posts, upload images and share posts on social bookmarking and networking websites. The company also offers tools for both displaying and buying online ads. TechJaws has called ScribeFire a blogger’s best friend, and LifeHacker has made it a download of the day, pointing out that “In addition to Blogger and WordPress, ScribeFire works with Jeeran, LiveJournal, TypePad and Windows Live Spaces.”
Inspired by TweetDeck, Monitter is a real-time Twitter monitor that lets you keep track of live posts for any three keywords you enter, plus filter the display by geographic location or language (English, Spanish, and German). Frederic Lardinois wrote in his ReadWriteWeb review of Monitter that “Monitter is a cool and well designed way to monitor keywords on Twitter.”
Overall, this is more for amusement than practical business use (though the inbound link checker is very thorough and accurate). dnScoop is a domain check and website valuation tool that estimates the value of an established website or a domain name using several different criteria including the number of inbound links; the popularity, age and Pagerank of the domain; website traffic; and other factors.
At first glance, Propeller look like just another Digg clone or YASN: a social bookmarking site where you can post links, vote on them, comment, and share them with friends or a group. However, the site is owned by AOL, so there’s a chance it will be able to keep spammers and objectionable material out while avoiding the problems like the Digg Mafia or the StumbleUpon witch hunt. At last check, the links here were still do-follow, so they have SEO value as well. 
Top 5 Free Web Applications by Search For Blogging
Mert Erkal, Chief Editor of Bloghology Magazine, shares his favoriate free web applications, including ADrive, an online service for storing, transferring and sharing very large files; Audacity, a powerful open-source audio-editing program; and LogMeIn, a free remote-access service similar to GoToMyPC.
Convert Archives Into Different Compression Formats (RAR to ZIP and etc) by Raymond.cc
Although ZIP is the most commonly used format for file compression on Windows PCs, several other compression formats actually do a better job of producing more compact files. If you ever receive archives in these formats (such as RAR, 7z or KGB) and can’t open them, or you’d like to be able to use alternative formats, this handy utility converts archives between numerous compression formats.
Testing the Quintura Site Search Widget by Pandia Search Engine News
Quintura is an alternative search engine developed in Russia, based on semantic technology. What sets it apart from the crowd of other alternative search engines is the way it presents search results in Web 2.0-style clouds of related search terms that help you narrow or expand your search simply by clicking your mouse. The folks at Pandia explain here how you can now use the same technology to spider and search your own site or blog—for free.
social bookmarking services and community websites submitter by Social Poster
Here’s a list of 79 social submission bookmarklets you can simply drag to your Firefox toolbar to install. The list includes direct links to register for each service, login and submit a new item, as well as each site’s Pagerank and Alexa rank. This is social posting for the lazy (or extremely busy).
Top 10 Obscure Google Search Tricks by Lifehacker
This isn’t actually a new tool but rather a collection of neat tricks for using Google to accomplish a range of tasks, from simple things like tracking flight status and calculating currency conversion to more advanced activities like finding free music, filtering image search results and evading your company’s site blocking software (ahem, not so sure that last one is a good idea, but it’s an interesting trick). These have been compiled by Gina Trapani, best-selling author of Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better
A search tool that provides “unlimited space,” enabling you to search Google, YouTube, RSS, eBay, Amazon, Yahoo!, Flickr and Images all in one 3D space. SpaceTime’s™ 3D Web Search lets you choose a search engine from the drop down menu, type in your search term and view all your search results at once in a slick 3D interface. It’s not quite something you can’t live without, but it is a fascinating and cool new way to search the web, find videos and shop online.
This is about as simple and elegant as web tools get. Hey, why waste twelve bucks on an alarm clock when you can make your $900 PC perform the same function?
Gmail Hacks, Tips & Tricks by Best of the Web
As with the Lifehacker post above, this isn’t a tool but rather an exceptionally useful collection of tips and tricks, in this case for Gmail users. Learn how to master Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts, streamline the process of adding attachments, quickly switch between multiple Google accounts, read your Google Reader RSS feeds from within Gmail, use Gmail as an external hard drive, back up your email account and more.
4Q – The Best Online Survey For A Website, Yours Free! by Occam’s Razor
Google Analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik offers a free on-exit web survey tool featuring three simple questions to help site owners determine why certain pages get visited much more frequently than others, why certain pages have higher exit or bounce rates, and other critical information, using real data rather than idle speculation.
Pageflakes Acquisition Confirmed by TechCrunch
Erick Schonfeld reported a few months ago that custom web startup page provider Pageflakes had been acquired by LiveUniverse. Pageflakes is a cool tool for making the web your own, similar to Netvibes or TopNetPix, and has been covered in this blog before, most recently in January of this year when several new features were added to the tool. Under its new ownership, the tool so far keeps getting better.
A collection of a dozen cool webmaster tools including Mark Alert (provides an alert anytime a domain uses your trademark), detailed uptime reports on web hosting providers, DNS Tools (whois, traceroute, and ping), Domain Monitor (a free tool to monitor all your domains) and more.
