Dan’s Wall of the Insanely Useful

I’ve learned some amazing tools since I started really trying to understand what is going on on the web and how to capitalize on the information explosion that’s happening all around us. These are the questions I tried to answer:

• What’s hot on the web right now? Hot subjects, hot websites? What news/links/blogs/social sites are increasing/decreasing in popularity? What keywords/tags are those sites are using?
• What are people typing into search engines (keywords)? What keywords are increasing/decreasing in popularity? What is the intent behind the search terms used – news? products? etc.
• So I’m looking at a website. What info can I get about it’s place in the web? What’s it’s ranking, how often have social websites bookmarked it? What keywords are people using to bookmark? How high does this site rank, and what terms does it rank for? What are other popular URLs that are similar to the current URL? (How do I quickly find related sources of information?)
• What are some easy ways to search various search engines without going to those websites?
• How do I bypass website registration tactics or control your social identity/logins/passwords to all my web accounts?

This may be a strange set of questions to ask. My intent is not to becomes some sort of internet overlord. My intent is to use the full power of the web, as it was meant to be used. Here are some of the strategies I’ve developed.

First I want to talk about the Firefox web browser. If you aren’t using Firefox, you don’t know what you’re missing. Firefox’s plug-in feature is what really makes it shine. Using plug-ins, I can all sorts of features to add value to my browsing experience. Please see my Firefox Megapost for the important plugins you should install. Don’t neglect this point. If there is a website you frequent, there is a very strong change there’s a firefox extension to help you check/manage it without actually going to the site.

Alright, lets get onto the collection of tips I have for answering the above questions and making the web work for you:

1. First, let me introduce you to Populair, which is one of the most powerful collections of links on the web. Populair give you links to most every important website that tracks current web events, from social bookmarking, to news, to blogs, to videos and music. Most of the larger social websites have a “feed” or news listing that tracks current activity of users. Populair is one of the major places to find those links.
2. Master Bookmarklets! Bookmarklets are saved like a regular bookmark, but when you click on them, it performs an action using a bit of javascript code. This lets you achieve all sorts of really cool useful tasks. Typically I use them to send a selected keyword to a search engine, or take the current URL I’m looking at and pump it into another website for analysis (SEO, keywords, ranking/popularity, similar websites.) Let’s try an example. Check out the del.icio.us URL lookup bookmarklet. This bookmarklet takes the current website address you are looking at and puts it into delicious’ URL lookup box, and then returns the result. In other words, with one click, I can see how many people bookmarked the current webpage and what keywords they used. Very cool! I keep a single folder named “Bookmarklets” in my bookmarks toolbar for two-click access to any bookmarklet. Killer bookmarklet collections on the net are here, here, here, here, and here. Don’t forget to checkout all the useful google bookmarkets, for doing quick searches of any google tool. And DO try out Blummy- it’s an excellent service for quickly creating custom bookmarklets, without needing to add them manually to your browser.
3. The next subject I want to discuss are aggregators. An aggregator is a web resource that collects other web resources and gives you the collected result. Aggregators are really useful if you want to track a particular subject or especially news articles. They certainly one of the most powerful modern web inventions, letting you easily and quickly view all the major content posts on the web, coming from what people are creating content on (blogs/news sources) or forming interest in (social bookmarks and organic traffic.)   , Popurls or Digglicious, Alltop, Movers 2.0, OriginalSignal, and Tendalicious. popacular.com. You might also want to bookmark any of the top news aggregators you may frequent (Google News, Digg, Slashdot, Royo, or any of the traditional news sites like CNN, BBC, New York Times, etc.,) favorite blogs, or personal data pages (email, finances, social sites) that you frequent. After you collect together the sites you normally use and that are giving you the information you want, next you want to put them into the firefox Fast Dial plugin so you see them instantly at startup or whenever you open a new tab. This is like a Birds-eye view into the web!
4. Other then sites that aggregate web links of increasing/decreasing popularity, there are more regular aggregator websites that pull content from multiple news pages at once, customized exactly to your liking. Almost every website that posts regular update news in blog-like format contains an RSS feed, which lets you use a web or offline application to quickly look at any recently posted content, WITHOUT having to go to the site. Some examples of good feed readers are Google Reader, Bloglines, Technorati, or the Sage-Too firefox extension.
5. Websites that pull in both blog and bookmarking content are often called homepage aggregators. Some of the more popular are Netvibes, Pageflakes, All My Faves, Protopage, iGoogle, My Yahoo. These sites are popular because they can pull together content from tons of other websites and make it available instantly to you. A new but very interesting aggregator is Pageonce, which can aggregate information most sites can’t, like banking information and personal passwords/data. And  on the social sides of things, FriendFeed aggregates your social “lifestream” from all your social networking sites at once like Myspace, Facebook, etc. (See the Social Networking entry below for even more social website resources.)
6. So now that you know how to track web buzz, how do you see which websites rank highest overall in activity? In terms of overall organic site ranking on the entire web, the three resources that track that data are Alexa, Complete, and Quantcast. Statsaholic will show Complete and Quantcast data side-by-side. AttentionMeter will show all three. Popuri.us will show data from multiple sites at once. Hitwize’s Datacenter and Blog also provide very good competitive data, but the complete details you have to pay for. Technorati gives rankings of the top blogs on the net to look out for.
7. Trying to get a website to rank higher in the overall web is often called linkbuilding, or in the case of search engines, SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Some notable websites that will give you SEO data on a specific URL are Popuri.us, Spyfu, UrlTrends, SEOmoz, and LinkDiagnosis. These sites can tell you information like how highly a website ranks for a specific keyword, and how the website compares to other top websites in it’s industry. Along with these sites, I highly recommend the rest of the tools at SEOmoz and SEO Book. Keep these sites in mind, but better yet, follow the next tip….
8. SEO continued. you definately should install and start using the SeoQuake or SEO for Firefox plugin, if you care about more detailed information about the websites you’re visiting. These beauties will give you a TON of information about both search engine results listings and the current page you are on, including Alexa/del.icio.us/etc Rank, Google/Yahoo/MSN index, Waybay engine data, IP address and a ton more. You can also configure them so they show as little or as much info as you want, and turn the off instantly if they are cluttering up your interface. Must haves!
9. In terms of popularity on social bookmarking sites, good resources are Backtags, SocialMeter, and Keotag. These sites show how high a URL ranks at some of the most popular social bookmarking sites. For even more resources regarding social bookmarking and tag popularity, you should definately bookmark 3Spots’ Social Bookmarking Resources list… this site has every social bookmarking and tag search tool known to man (!!!) Backtag’s tag search feature is excellent for finding top ranking URLs across ALL social bookmarking sites, rather then having to look at each one. And SocialMeter can send you directly to a social bookmarking site’s url lookup page, so you can directly check on tags and popularity of a site (similar to what you can do with Bookmarklets.) If you’re looking to share URLs on the social networks to improve your ranking, you can use the Sharaholic extension. But I personaly prefer the Social Poster bookmarklet or AddThis if you have a website/blog and want to people to be able to link to it.
10. If the “social networking” and tracking your friend’s online browsing history is important to you (and even if it’s not) Install the Yoono extension. The most important feature here is the “Discoveries” feature, which shows you the top websites on the web similar to the website you’re currently looking at. Killer! And MUCH simplier then inputting the site url in every social bookmarking url lookup tool, which can only show you what tags people are using for the site (so you have to browse tags to look for simlar sites. Other plugin to lookout for in this space are BlogRovr, which shows you blog posts about the current website and SocialBrowse, which similarly lets you discuss the link that you’re browsing. A big staple people seem to love in this area is StumbleUpon. Or if you want a web browser that integrates a lot of social services right into the browser, try Flock. (Some people think Flock is like Firefox on steroids, which is really saying something!) Me personally, I prefer the offline application called Digsby to follow my friends, but to each their own.
11. With tips 8-12, the key point I’m trying to get across to you is that all web URLs are ranked and related to each other in some fashion. They contain what are called Backlinks, or references from other websites that link to them, using specific data like search terms or social bookmarking tags. Lookup the data, and you can instantly find related websites to the current URL you might be interested in. For example, take a web link and put it into Similicio.us to see related links. This kind of research can also be carried out with bookmarklets. The Alexa Info bookmarklet, for example, takes the current web URL and inputs it into the address “www.alexa.com/data/details/related_links/(current web url)”, showing you Alexa’s list of related websites for a URL. Or the Google Related Bookmarklet will search google for “related:(web url)”, showing you what google thinks is related to the current URL. See how powerful this is? The sites you find by doing this are typically much more relevant to you then doing a normal google search, because they are directly based on links you like already (like the current one you’re looking at!)
12. To find out keyword search popularity and trends (what people are searching for), there are a lot of good resources. SEOmoz Daily Popular, MostPopularKeywords, Google Zeitgeist, Google Insights for Search, Wordtracker, KeywordDiscovery, NicheBot, KeyComplete, NicheWatch, and the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator. Some of these services want you to pay to get more detailed data. Also, SearchEngineWatch and SearchEngineJournal both have good posts listing a few of the major keyword buzz sites- but you can also see many of these links already through the afore-mentioned Populair.
13. Get an inside peak into a website’s code, revealing everything about how their site works. Awesome if you’re a web developer and are trying to figure out how a site achieves a particular look. Good extentions for this are Firebug and Web Developer. Also, the XRAY bookmarklet is very cool for inspecting object properties on a site.
14. Learn all the advanced Google operators. Google can tell you a ton of information about a site if you play around with the advanced tools. Show all web pages in a site, show what google thinks are sites related to the site, etc.
15. If del.cio.us isn’t enough web link “grabbage” for you, there are other tools which let you download web content for research. Install Scrapbook, which lets you archieve specific content from websites and pull it down right onto your hardrive. Or checkout Screengrab, which lets you save an entire website as an image.
16. Ok, now some killer search engine tips. Everyone knows Firefox has a search box on the right and you can go to “Manage Search Engines” to put your favorite search engines in this box. But this can be somewhat slow, especially if you do a lot of searches from different engines. First step to search speed: Keyword, or “Smart” searches. Go to a site with a search box you want to frequent, Right-click the box, then choose “Add keyword for this search“. What happens is you bookmark the search box with the shortcut. So if you want to search yahoo (keyword “y”) for a term, all you have to do is put the cursor in your address bar and type “y keyword” and you will search yahoo WITHOUT having to navigate to yahoo in the firefox search box. Nifty, eh?
17. Here are some great plugins for extending search. CustomizeGoogle and GooglePreview are killer for adding a bunch of productivity improvements to google searches. AutoCopy puts any text you select instantly in the clipboard, which is pretty cool for putting into a search bar. Or you can use Hyperwords, which gives you a ton of search options for a word using your Right-click menu. If you want to select text on a website and
18. But we have something even better then all of that. And the Ultimate step to speed, one of the most important tips on this post, is: Use Yubnub! This is a web service that lets you use thousands of search engines by keyword, already set up and ready to go, without you doing anything. Check out their commands list to see if they have the search engine you want, and what the command is. Add it if you don’t. Plus, you can integrate Yubnub directly into firefox’s address bar, which means you can use Yubnub directly, without needing to store any Smart Search bookmarks. Type “about:config” into the address bar, then enter “keyword.URL” into the filter box. Change the entry to: “http://www.yubnub.org/parser/parse?default=g2&command=” This changes the default addressbar search from google to yubnub, so whatever you typed into the addressbar gets searched in yubnub. Forget using the search box ever again!
19. Once you get going with Yubnub, you will start to realize you can use it for all your Backlink searches as well as your normal search engine searches. First learn to search Yubnub by typing “ls (website)” to see if there’s a Yubnub command for any of the backlink searchers you want to use. When I typed “ls Alexa”, I found that the Yubnub command for an Alexa site lookup is simply “alexa”. So now, if I want to see Alexa’s URL info for any URL I’m at, all I need to do is go up to the address bar, type “alexa” and a space before the address showing in the bar, then hit return. Instant site lookup in Alexa! Try it with all your other favorite SEO tools and social bookmarking sites, and you can avoid most bookmarklets all together.

Ok, so now you are completely armed to the teeth with resources to empower your life on the web But there are a few last minute tips I want you to have, so don’t miss this section.

1. It can be a real pain trying to create unique, secure passwords for all the website accounts you frequent. You don’t want to use the same password at every site, and you don’t want the passwords to be easy to guess. Enter SuperGenPass (I love this thing!) SuperGenPass is a bookmarklet that creates a unique, secure password, that is different for every website. Best of all, all you have to do is remember a “master password” that you use for everything.
2. Remember that BugMeNot can save you from needing accounts at a lot of websites out there. Before you create an account just to reply to a simple post, check BugMeNot to see if you can get in without any hastle.
3. Never, but never, enter your real email address into a website form. You will get spammed unmercifully. Instead, take advantage of a free service called Spamgourmet. This will let you create a unique email address for every online account, which you can then kill off if you start getting spam. All of my online accounts use Spamgourmet addresses, and it works so well that I haven’t had to close my email account due to spam in the past 5 years.
4. Find out if your connection is slowing down or not by doing a quick speed test at Speakeasy or Speedtest.net. Also, lookup a lot of useful info about how you are connecting to the internet (IP address, physical location) here.

Whew, that’s it. No joke, this post took me about a day to write, lol! I hope you enjoyed it. So go out there and conquer the world with Firefox!