Social News Websites and Communities

The usual way of multiplying information today is through social media, expanding the networks to gain readers and traffic. The evolution that came to us a Web 2.0 sites is a gift that we can manage anything we like and of course, the thing we don’t like. Anyone who engaged in long investments in the web is optimistic, and willing to find more resources to use for expanding ones network. I admit, I’m one of that.

Finding resources in the web is quite a headache sometimes, sometimes they gave massive information about social media that is already been down or shutdown. Some of them are waste of our time; they are riddled with spam or so ill-promoted that they’ll never attract a critical mass of viewers or social media participants.

I just want to share this few List of Web 2.0 sites and Social News sites. This is the sites that I already used and I found it really good. The updates, networks and interactions are enough to give us what exactly we want.

Digg – This is one of the largest and most popular social news websites on the net. They cover all the topic that we usually searched.

Reddit – popular social news website with a large user base. They cover a wide range of news and includes several topical sections called subreddits, which focus on specific topic like programming, science, politics and business.

Propeller – this site is operate same fashion to Digg. A social media site that covers all the topic from politics to technology to entertainment.

Fark – community news sites which allow users to comment on news articles.

Slashdot – the prime category of this site is about tech but they also covered other topic such as books, games, politics and entertainment.

Metafilter – a community weblog which allow users to share links and discuss interesting websites and topics. Moderation is done by the editors as well as peer pressure in order to prevent gaming.

Mixx – A general Social news sites which has category for all types of news

I am bored – Covers general topics with a strong focus on weird and offbeat news.

Shoutwire – general news site that is populated with a loyal group of users. Topic covered include technology, politics, entertainment, lifestyle and sports.

Newsvine – consisting of community-driven news stories and opinions.

IndianPad – a general social media site that with a Indian userbase. Topics covered include entertainment , sports, videos and tamil news.

Linkfilter – covers all sorts of news. All links are posted and moderated by users. Links can be ranked on several levels: clicks, votes, ages or combination of all three called points.

NewsCloud – general social media site with a focus on news in all topics. Similar to Newsvine, each user has their own blogs and can publish contents to be voted up by other users.

Hugg – social news site with a strong focus on environmenta issues. Also includes other categories like politics, science and fashion and technology.

Plime – general news site which features a wide variety of topics ranging from religion and sports to technology or business. Odd news perform best in this community.

C2NN – active social news site with a variety of topics including environment issues, business, politics, animals and offbeat.

Kirsty – general news site with a focus on fashion, entertainment and design on top other topics like technology and food. Has a strong female user base.

Nowpublic – a general news network which focuses on citizen journalism.

Stirrdup -general news site with four broad categories: politics, technology, news and entertainment.

Searchles – a hybrid social news site which covers all topics. It also includes a video section..

Linkinn – social news site that specialized in picture and video.

Earthfrisk – covers topic like humor, politics, entertainment, and business. Combines a social network and group features with digg style news voting.

Truemors – A social rumor news site which focus on the publication.

StumbleUpon – a social network and browser toolbars which allow users to channel surf the internet.

Sphinn – a social site for search and interactive marketers. It’s a designed to allow you to share and discover new stories, read and take part in discussion, discover events of interest and network with others.

Dzone – is a free link-sharing community for developers.

Tweako – a user-powered and social network with a focus on guides and tutorials in all categories like computing technology and the internet.

Autospies – a social media sites focuses on automotive news, car reviews, auto show photos and videos.

Design Float – a social news site for design related content.

Ball Hype – a site that aggregates contents from thousands of sport blogs.

YCombinator Hacker News – a news site that focuses on technology, startups, business and entrepreneurship.

SWiK – a community driven resource for people who use open source software.

Buzzflash – a user driven progressive political news website that allows submit political stories.

DNHour – user powered news portal built specially for the domain name industry.

PlugIM – a user driven internet marketing community.

Showhype – operates in a similar way to Ballhype.

Small Business Brief – a social site which focuses on small business news .

Hypediss – a social news sites with a focus on design, fashion, urban culture and art.

Chictini – product oriented social site with a focus on new trend and style.

DotNetKicks – community based news site that focuses on topics like NET development techniques, technologies and tools.

Lipstick – Reddit style social news for celebrity gossip.

Hubspot – social news site for marketer, entrepreneurs and business professionals.

Winelifetoday – a social news site for wine lovers.

iliketotallyloveit.com – allows users to publish and share products with a broader public.

Wordsy – news site for the people who love reading and books.

Value Investing News – social news site that covers stocks and investments news.

Muti – a social bookmarking sites inspired by Reddit and Digg.

Teenwag – focus on celebrity gossip. A hybrid social network with Digg style voting.

My list is still on working, more sites are on the way. Hope this few list of social network sites can help. Please comment or suggestions , additions to the list.

Enjoy widening the netwoks!

Tools for Blogging

I found this this resources from a very informative blog about social media, I decide to share this on my blog to share more the information that I discover. This is a collections of useful and free tools for blogging that everyone can use to check the everyone's blog performance and enhance the blog ranking. Let's try this tools and explore and see what this tools can do.

Search Engine Tools

• Google Page Rank Checker - Check your page rank from the major Google data centers.
• Google and Alexa Rank Checker - Use this tool to check your Google Page Rank and Alexa Traffic Rank at the same time.
• Google Page Rank Prediction Tool - This tool lets you predict your Google Page Rank in the next page rank update.
• Backlink Checker - Use this tool to check how many backlinks do pages of your website have.
• Search Engine Position Checker - Check the position of your website on certain keyword in the Google result page.
• Search Engine Index Checker - Check how many pages of your website is indexed by Google, MSN and Yahoo!
• Google Banned Checker - Is your website banned from Google? Use this tool to find out.
• Link Popularity Checker - Link Popularity Checker lets you find out how many links a domain has on the most common search engines.
• Search Engine Listing Preview - Use Search Engine Listing Preview tool to check how your pages appear on major search engines (Google, MSN and Yahoo!).
• Spider View Tool - Spider View Tool will enable you to view the perspective of a search engine spider, from the website you require to view.
• Keyword Suggestion Tool - Keyword Suggestion Tool will display up to 10 popular keywords matching your initial keyword.
• Cloaking Checker Tool - Cloaking Checker Tool let you enter a URL and compare how search engine sees it as opposed to real website browsers.
• Visual Page Rank Checker
  - Visual Page Rank Checker tool will enable you to view all the links
  along with the page ranks on the page that you require to view.
• URL Redirect Checker - URL Redirect Checker is a tool that helps you determine if the redirect you have created is Search Engine Friendly.
• Keyword Density Checker - Use Keyword Density Checker to help you achieve optimum keyword distribution.
• Google Data Center Search - Use this tool to search for keywords and key phrases through different Google data centers.

Domain Checkup Tools

• Alexa Traffic Rank Checker - Instantly check your website’s Alexa traffic rank.
• Reciprocal Link Checker - Make sure your link exchange partners still have your links. You may check it with this tool.
• Domain Name Availability Checker - Check whether the domain name you have in mind is still available for registration.
• Domain Whois - Get more information about a domain name with this tool.
• Broken Link Checker - Use this tool to detect and correct broken links in your website.
• Domain Name Lookup Tool
  - The Domain Name Lookup tool lets you find out more about domain names
  including Google Page Rank, Alexa Traffic Rank, number of backlinks,
  age of domain name etc.
• IP Locator Tool - The IP Locator Tool helps you determine the country of origin of certain IP address.
• Link Price Calculator Tool - The Link Price Calculator estimates how much you should pay and charge for a link in certain pages of your website.
• Ping Test Tool - The Ping Test Tool lets you check for an active connection.
• Reverse IP Lookup Tool
  - Reverse IP Lookup Tool lets you search for domain names hosted on
  your IP address. Just enter a domain or an IP address to get a list of
  domain names that share the same IP address.
• Server Status Checker - Use this blogging tool to instantly check for the status of any website.
• Website Speed Checker -
  Check the loading speed of your website with the Website Speed Checker
  tool. Too slow? Perhaps you need to optimize the page or move to a
  faster server.

HTML Blogging Tools

• Source Code Viewer - This tool lets you see how a website is scripted and coded.
• Meta Tag Generator
  - Meta tag generator helps you create a functional meta tag you can use
  in your blog. Google don’t use meta tags but there are still some
  search engines that do.
• Meta Tag Extractor - Find out what meta tags are used by your competitors with the Meta Tag Extractor tool.
• Link Extractor Tool
  - The Link Extractor Tool will enable you to extract links from a
  specific web page with associated anchor text, HTML code, attributes
  and Google pagerank
• HTML Optimizer Tool - This tool lets you optimize your HTML code to make your website load faster.
• HTTP Header Extractor - The HTTP Header extractor extracts the HTTP Headers of a server. Find out exactly what your browser reads.

Miscellaneous Blogging Tools

• Browser Detail Tool
  - Use this tool to find out your IP address and hostname, your browser
  details (User-Agent, Cookies Enabled, Java Enabled , JavaScript Status,
  Screen Width & Height, CPU class/type, Screen Colour Depth, Window
  Width & Height) and browser headers.
• Google Adsense Calculator - Google Adsense Calculator predicts changes in your earnings depending on Impressions, Click Rate and Cost Per Click.
• Google Adsense Preview - Google Adsense Preview tool will display some sample ads targeted for your website by Google Adsense.
• Link Shortener Tool - The Link shortener is a tool that lets user to make a long web address short and easy to remember link for that web address.
• List Cleaner Tool - The List Cleaner Tool will give you the capability to clean and remove duplicates from a list in a matter of seconds.
• md5 Encrypt Tool - The md5 Encrypt Tool is a simple online converter tool to encode any inputted text to md5 encryption.
• Unix Time Converter
  - The Unix Time Converter is a useful tool when dealing with UNIX
  internal time formats. You can use this tool to convert UNIX internal
  time formats to a date or Vice versa.
• .htaccess URL Rewrite Tool - The .htaccess URL Rewrite Tool will convert your long and dynamic address into a short and search engine friendly URL.

Idea about Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organized, searched and manages bookmarks of the web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata. This system allows to save links to web pages that they want to remember and they want to share. This bookmarks are usually public or private, its up to the users prefers and shared only with specified people or groups, inside a network or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view there bookmark chronogically by category or tags or via search engine.

In many ways, the information gathered by social bookmarking services is like the wild, young sibling of the web directories. But now, every web surfer is a potential editor, licensed to categorize and recommend all kinds of web sites.

These are top of the list Bookmarking sites:

Furl
Netvous
Del.icio.us
Ma.gnolia
Bluedot
Yahoo’s MyWeb
Blogmarks
Google Bookmarks
Technorati
Propeller
StumbleUpon
Reddit
Mixx
MyBlogLog
Kaboodle
Bloglines
Newsvine
Blinklist
Clipmarks
Mister-Wong
Dzone
Tailrank
ShoutWire
Simpy
Spurl
Spotback
MyBookmarks
Yahoo! Buzz

The Web 2.O

The term web 2.0 is a picture that describe the evolution that changing the trends in the use of World Wide Web and web design that encourage to enhance creativity, secure information, communication, collaboration and functionality of the web, This concept has led to development and evolution of web culture communities and hosted services such as social networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis, blogs and folksonomies. The term was born after the first O’Rielly Media web 2.0 conference in 2004.

Although the term suggest a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specification, but rather to change in the ways software developers and end-users utilized the Web according to Tim O’Rielly.