Here are more of the most useful business, social media and web marketing tools of 2008. Included here are some interesting new tools for getting more out of search, reflecting your personality on Twitter, collaborating with teammates online, writing blog posts more efficiently, accessing your home or office desktop PC from the road, and more.
Surf CanyonSurf 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."
ProjjexIn 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.
feedkillerfeedkiller 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.
SearchCloudSearchCloud 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 this one-minute video on how to use it:
ScribeFireScribeFire 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."
MonitterInspired 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."
dnScoopOverall, 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.
PropellerAt 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.
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.
Previous posts in this series:Best of 2008 (So Far) - SEO Guidance, Part 1Best of 2008 (So Far) - SEO Guidance, Part 2Best of 2008 (So Far) - Search Engine Marketing, Part 1Best of 2008 (So Far) - Cool Web Tools, Part 1Best of 2008 (So Far) - Social Media Optimization, Part 1Best of 2008 (So Far) - Blogging for Business, Part 1Best of 2008 (So Far) - Web Marketing Research, Part 1Best of 2008 (So Far) - Website Design, Part 1Best of 2008 (So Far) - SEO Link BuildingBest of 2008 (So Far) - Search Engine Marketing, Part 2Best of 2008 (So Far) - Social Media Optimization, Part 2Best of 2008 (So Far) - SEO Guidance, Part 3*****
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