No matter how much we can be frustrated with Digg nonexistent customer support and powered-by-few story selection, we can’t ignore the site.

Why? If you are an Internet marketer, you need to know what’s hot online. If you are a link baiter, you need to know what appeals to the public. If you are a blogger, you need constant stream of news and inspiration. And if you are a social media marketer, you need to be connected to power Diggers.

So accept this, Digg is still useful and monitoring it helps a lot (I wanted to say “is a must” but then thought many successful online marketers can still do without it, so not a must but very helpful).

With the huge number of stories submitted and categories to track it is not easy to monitor Digg and spend minimum time for that. So let me share just a few most useful tools that save time but allow you to keep an eye on Digg activity:

DiggTop

DiggTop (runs on Adobe AIR). What I really love about the tool is that:

• You can save time by not clicking through: you can get a summary of each story by clicking on it; you can also Digg the story and load associated images right within the tool.

• It has a plenty of options to configure for better monitoring and notifications:

Set up category and keyword filters: add keywords you want to see stories for, or filter out stories by a “bad word”:

Set up notifications: get notified when a story with specified keywords gets more than the specified number of Diggs:

Digg’s Top Stories

Digg’s Top Stories is a plugin for the Google Desktop Sidebar. It looks similar to DiggTop but has very limited functionality.

All it essentially does is keeping track of the most recent hot Digg stories and displaying the story title, short description and time it went hot. When clicked, the story description expands and the submission link appears.

Online Tools and RSS Filters

PiggFeed is an awesome online Digg RSS filter that allows to create Digg feeds by (the combination of!) numerous criteria:

• Category and subcategory;
• Number of entries;
• Number of Diggs (min and max);
• Keyword;
• Embed media.

Disstill.com allows to filter stories by number of Diggs it has received so far.

Post image by NightRPStar

Twitter is recognized as one of the best viral marketing tools. So if you have a good post you think might go viral, Twitter is your best bet to attract people’s and ‘linkers’ attention to it.

One of the most important steps in turning Twitter into an effective viral marketing tool is to make the sharing process “smooth” – and a good Twitter button inviting nicely to spread the word can be highly effective.

Buttons That Encourage Readers to Tweet Your Posts

WordPress Plugins

Tweet this! is a fairly popular WordPress plugin that lets users easily Tweet each post of the blog. It works like any social bookmarking button that allows to share a story with two clicks. It re-directs you to your Twitter home page and redirects a Tweet containing the post title and link; all you have to do is to click “Update”:

It also includes support for Plurk, Yahoo Buzz, Delicious, Digg, Ping.fm, Reddit, and StumbleUpon.

Referrer Detector (not a button, but should be mentioned here) identifies users coming from Twitter (as well as other platforms) and shows them a personalized message to encourage to Tweet this post:

“Hello fellow Twitter user! If you find this page useful, why not share it on Twitter?”

Create the Button Yourself:

All you need is this code:

<a href=”http://twitter.com/home?status=Currently reading <?php the_permalink(); ?>” title=”Click to send this page to Twitter!” target=”_blank” rel=”nofollow”>Share on Twitter</a>

And use Photoshop or other editor to create the button image.

Add Tweetmeme Button

Tweetmeme offers cool buttons that invite to retweet the post. It generates a tweet that addresses @tweetmeme – this allows the service to rate the story and also to display the retweet count. It also automatically shortens the post URL via Bit.ly

Buttons that Increase Your “Followship”

Twitter Counter is the button that shows how many people are already following you on Twitter and invites the visitor to join them. The psychology is similar to revealing your blog RSS subscription: if your blog has a lot of subscribers, it must be really useful and high-quality and chances are, many people will feel inclined to subscribe too. So if you have a solid followship on Twitter, revealing the stats will encourage more people to follow.

Another third-party service to consider is ‘Twit this‘ – but it seems to require registration.

Cool collections of Twitter buttons:

• Vincentabry.com
• SiahDesign.com
• Randaclay.com
• TwitterButtons.com
• TwitButtons
• Twittericon

Twit Stamp (also not a button, but really cool one) generates a cool widget containing a link to your profile and your most recent Tweet. The widget is available in multiple sizes and colors:

More reading on integrating Twitter to your site:

• 181 Free Twitter Buttons, Badges, Widget and Counters to Help You Find Followers;

Post image source: mynameiskate.ca

What makes image search different from text search is that people searching for images are most often looking for some entertainment rather than business-related or informative content.

What else differentiates image search is that image content is often subjective – you can ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ images; besides, more often than not you even don’t know exactly what you are looking for and what you want to find.

So here are some fun tools that turn searching for images into fun and also let you find you don’t know what:

Search Images by Color:

Multicolr is Flickr-based color search engines. With it you can mix up to 10 colors and select images matching the chosen color palette.

The more colors you choose, the more colorful images you get in the end:

Each search result has its own URL, so you can share it with friends. Here’s my latest pick:

Search Images by Similarity:

Byo image search will find images similar to the one you upload. The exact algorithm is unclear but it seems it rather focuses on colors, though some similarity in forms and shapes can also be identified.

Retrievr is a Flickr based tool searching for images based on your sketch You can also rate sketches created by others.

Search Images by Theme:

Tiltomo (Flickr based) searched for images by either color palette and texture or theme (too bad those two criteria can’t be combined). It has its own database of Flickr images, which means this database is not always up-to-date.

It is impressive that the engine finds images that really have similar topic (and the similarity is not clear even to a human eye). For example, the following search results definitely have something in common (strawberries) but the similarity is not about shapes, colors or forms, it’s about theme:

Search Images by Face:

Exalead offers imagecontent:Face advanced operator that restricts search results to faces only. Google also provides that feature accessible via advanced search:

Post image by Andyrob

If you are an avid Twitterer, you must be using some third-party application to send and receive Tweets. However this doesn’t mean you don’t ever enter Twitter web interface. The following Twitter Greasemonkey plugins will encourage you to do that more often and will make your Twittering experience enjoyable.

Note: since Twitter redirects /home page to /timeline/home now, you will have to manually edit the URL of the scripts sometimes. For this right-click the Greasemonkey icon in the status bar, choose “Manage User Scripts”, choose the script that is supposed to work on your Twitter home page, select the URL and change it to /timeline/home*

Integrate:

Twitter Search Results on Google: this script displays the most recent 5 tweets for the query that you are search for, giving both real-time Twitter search results and Google results on the same page:

Google Reader + Twitter: this script integrates Twitter into your Google Reader:

Enhance:

Troys Twitter Script has a plenty of cool features: it displays a “Retweet” button and also automatically displays TwitPic images:

Twitter and FriendFeed Short URL Expander: shows you the full URL shortened by snipr, tinyurl.com, is.gd, zz.gd and bit.ly.

Show # of unread replies: the script displays the number of unread @replies and adds a Mentions tab in the Twitter sidebar.

Twitter hashtags: adds links to hashtags.org, twemes.com or search.twitter.com to tweets on Twitter home page.

Twitastic Twitter Enhancer autolinks hashtags in messages and makes them searchable via the Twitter Search API by clicking on them. Also expands TinyURL links.

Nested Twitter Replies: looks for the phrase “in reply to [user]” and recursively gets all replies to display the conversation thread as a nested block.

Twitter Sidebar Replies: shows replies in the sidebar of the user’s Twitter page.

Twitter Auto Complete: the script assists you to enter your contacts when twittering. Twitter Auto Complete shows your contacts while entering an ‘@’ and autocompletes your contact when only one option is remaining.

Retweet This: appends a retweet button to the end of each twitter entry.

Twitter friend name helper: shows list of friend names when you type “@” or “D”

Browse with Twitter (if you want the whole world to know everything about you): updates your twitter.com status with a message “Browsing: [document.title]” whenever you load a web page.

Twitter Friends Bio at a Glance – shows bio text, following count and web link for all friends and followers on the Twitter follow or friends list.

Make it Cleaner:

Twitter Filter (as the name suggests) filters keywords from the Twitter home page. Use this user script to enable regex whitelists and blacklists for filtering out tweets in your Twitter stream.

Add any word and click “Enter” to see immediate result. As long as cookies are retained, the filter will remember your selections.

Delete Twitter Messages: erases ALL your direct messages. Just enable it and go to Twitter direct messages , and let it trash the messages while you do another thing.

Now Shoosh! – hides any of your friends’ tweets from your view (in case you followed someone back because you felt you had to but didn’t really want to hear anything from him).

Post image by Mykl Roventine

Love it or hate it, Wikipedia is a valuable resource of useful information. It may be argued if the information provided is reliable (as it is added by non-experts), but what is for sure, the site stores the huge volume of data which is discusses, edited and moderated to ensure it provides value.

Another great thing about Wikipedia is that it has a great number of possible implications due to its clear “inter-linked” structure and high popularity. So, let’s have a look at various tools that make Wikipedia even more useful and “usable”.

Wikipedia Search Engines:

PowerSet is Wikipedia search engine applying its natural language processing to search. In fact, using it often saves me from the trouble to open Wikipedia pages. It offers FireFox search plugin for quicker access.

The application answers questions quite accurately. Besides, for each query the tool collects so-called “Factz”, i.e. related concepts and topics. For example, searching for ‘brand’ returns the following “Factz”:

Brand:

includes :
Westhroid, Naturethroid, Armour, Nesquik, Dinkum, Crusha, foods, Tobacco, Oysters,

uses : letters, infomercials, systems, commands, variation, spots, method and creators.

appear on :
timetables, literature, product, gasoline, sides and ends.

Similpedia searched for similar stories on Wikipedia by URL or text. It is a great way to find which Wiki articles a page can associate with:

Cognition is Wikipedia linguistic meaning-based search engine that compares its search results with additional statistical pattern-matching search engines.

FireFox Addon

QuickWiki is a handy little addon that allows for a quick access to Wikipedia. Its handy shortcuts (which can be configured) include:

• SHIFT + SPACE: to open the search window;
• CTRL and right-click: to look up any word in Wikipedia:

Tools to Spot Hottest Articles:

Wikirage detects pages with highest number of edits. This basically means, with it you can find most questionable and controversial entries: popular people in the news, the latest fads, and the hottest video games, Internet memes, zietgeist, etc.

It allows you to filter results by date: find pages edited in the last hough, 6 hours, day, 3 days, week or month.

Similarly, Deletionpedia tracks pages deleted from Wikipedia. Like the above, it has a separate section for pages that were first heavily edited and only then deleted (“Pages deleted after more than 1000 days on Wikipedia”). It also features most recent and hottest phrases on the home page. Topics are sorted alphabetically.

Take Wikipedia Offline:

WikiTaxi is multilingual portable application that delivers the Wikipedia of your choice to wherever you go. WikiTaxi is up to date. It works with the original Wikipedia database dumps, which are updated regularly every few weeks or so. It requires no installation. All you will need to do is to extract the WikiTaxi archive to any folder. To uninstall, simply delete the executable file.

Pocket Wikipedia is another way to save Wikipedia on your computer, it is a hand-checked selection from Wikipedia which is about the size of a fifteen volume encyclopedia (24,000 images and 14 million words). It works on PocketPC, Windows and Linux systems.

Visualization tools:

Wikipedia-roll “accesses to a global vision of a subject through the definition and items of the article in Wikipedia.” It sorts the topic into concepts and sub-concepts, graphically representing the article.

For example, “Brand” topic is divided into following sections:

• Key elements;
• Concepts;
• Branding approach;
• See also;
• History;
• Bibliography:

VisWiki enhances each Wikipedia article with the “tree of related topics and subtopics:

EyePlorer developed by German company Vionto.com visualizes knowledge graphs (k-graphs) derived from Wikipedia content. Each k-graph consists of eyespots representing concepts that are connected to your topic. For better orientation those eyespots are clustered. If you want to know how any eyespot is connected to your topic, just click on it.

Statistics:

Wikipedia article traffic statistics: shows traffic stats for any Wiki article for any month. You can choose any month to see the stats for:

Wikirank trends any topic popularity on Wikipedia. It also offers handy as-you-type search suggestions.

You can compare popularity of several topics. What’s more, you can see most read articles for the last 30 days and currently trending topics (i.e. recent movers and shakers).

Post image by Jimbo Wales

Do you remember how Facebook started? When Myspace had been around for a while, Facebook popped up as a clean, clutter-free alternative that cared for their users’ privacy and security. Naturally, with growing popularity Facebook lost many of its cool features and it is no more that calm place it used to be.

Of course, you may like new” Facebook but for those who miss the “good old” Facebook, here are some tips for you on how to remove some clutter and get control over your privacy settings:

Block Facebook Applications:

You can fully opt out of sharing information through Facebook applications. For that, you need to first remove any applications you have added, and remove your permissions to all external applications that you may have used.

After that, navigate: Settings -> Privacy Settings -> Applications -> “Settings” tab

You can also block any particular application (if it gets particularly annoying) right from the “Requests” (reqs.php) page:

Block People:

If anyone is really annoying, you can block him completely.

If you block someone, they will not be able to find you in a Facebook search, see your Profile or interact with you through Facebook channels (such as Wall posts, Poke, etc.). Any Facebook ties you currently have with a person you block will be broken (for example, friendship connections, Relationship Status, etc.). Note that blocking someone may not prevent all communications and interactions in third party applications…

Control Who Sees What

It is funny how many different people are united by your Facebook profile: your friends, relatives, colleagues, employers, etc. Obviously to feel free doing whatever you want there, you might want to control who of your friends can access some of your private data (like photos or even status updates). Facebook allows you to customize how different people see your profile.

Navigate: Setting -> Privacy settings – Profile -> “Basic” tab

Now, choose any item you want to block from someone and choose “Customize” from the drop-down list.

You should see the following window:

Notice the field at the bottom which enables you to block any user from seeing this information. Naturally, you can add as many people as you want there.

Reduce Email Clutter:

Those messages from groups and multiple friends (you may have no idea who many of them are) can be annoying.

Navigate: Settings -> Account Settings -> “Notifications” tab

And remove as many email notifications as you deem necessary: