Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Browse the Web in a Different way

While Facebook does form the Web universe for several people, several of us are avid web surfers who like to read about topics of our interest on the Web. the internet can be a vast source of knowledge, however with the sheer enormity of information, it can be quite a daunting task to dig out the relevant content.
The best way to find out relevant content for out topic of interest is to access web pages/ sites which have already been rated by others and come with a high "approval" and "relevance" rating.

There are several websites which allow one to access sites based on user ratings - Two of the most popular ones are Digg and Delicious . However, the one which I find most easy to use and more relevant is Stumble Upon.

This website scores over others by virtue of its single window surfing and excellent interest based site categorization. Just register at the website, tick your interests, and presto - you are ready to surf the web like never before. The stumble engine "remixes" your interests really well so that you are never on one category for too long. The selection of sites is excellent and you can see lot of stuff which you otherwise would never have accessed. If you particularly like some website, you can rate it "thumbs up", thus contributing to the rating process. Beware though, this is highly addictive and you can easily spend hours on the site without even noticing.

Social Media Tracking

Social Media Marketing has become the next big thing for consumer brands. While a firm can end up doing a lot of activities on Facebook, Twitter etc, keeping a track of the effectiveness of all these activities becomes unwieldy pretty soon.

This is where web tools such Trackur come in. This simple tool gives an aggregated RSS viewer kind of view of all the mentions of any keyword on social media websites. This site has paid options starting from $18 per month, although they also provide a basic free version. The free version has certain limitations and can only save one keyword search at a time. However, it can be very useful to try before the decision to go for a paid version is made.