Web 2.What?

I’m just on my way out to CUBA, for a much-needed vacation. I wanted to be all fancy and schedule some posts for next week, but alas, I have an hour until I’m at the airport, and I haven’t started yet. Oh well. I will see you on April 5!

With so many social media tools out there, how do you find the right one for you?

The answer–and I’m sorry to say–is I don’t know… Or let’s go with the famous ‘marketing’ answer: It depends. However, I’ll document a few I use and why I chose to use them:

Micro-blogging
I’m a Twitteraholic. No doubt about that. However, I will admit I have yet to try out the competitors (Namely, Pownce and Jaiku, as well as Utterz I believe). Usually I like to try out a few before I commit, but I’m so in love with Twitter (aka addicted), I just don’t have time for the others! I’ll admit–I also love how the name lends itself to cute wordplays like twitterverse and twitterati etc., but that’s just one of the many reasons.

*Update*

• Pretty much everyone agrees, Twitter rocks!

Blogging Platform
First I started out my blogging life using Blogger, because it seemed the easiest for beginners. I wasn’t completely thrilled and contemplated switching, right until Google bought it out and re-vamped it. I fell in love, but when the company I worked for was acquired, Blogger wasn’t flexible enough. So I learned Wordpress and I have never looked back. Recently, however, I began blogging over at Ottawa.Cityguide.ca, which uses Moveable Type. I’m no expert yet, but so far I’m liking it a lot. However I’m only a contributor on Moveable Type, so I can’t say for sure how they templates, set up, etc. work.

Therefore my favourite would have to be Wordpress. It’s easy-to-use and I was able to set it up on my own domain quickly and easily. Though I have yet to use Typepad, which I know many swear by.

*Update*

• Johann Burkard recommends a service called blojsom, I’ve never heard of it, but apparently Apple uses it for one of its web servers.

RSS Readers
I started out using Newsgator, not even sure why, but I noticed that a large majority of my subscribers were using Google Reader–I was intrigued–so I checked it out and sure enough, fell in love. I’ve also tried managing some feeds through my iGoogle page, but I think I consume too much for that to be a viable option. What I would love is a reader built into an app that could sit on my desktop and scroll through new headlines for all my feeds. I’m not even sure if it exists-but I would love it.

*Update*

• Dave Barger recommends Outlook 2007’s built in reader. I’ve never used it, but I’ve heard lots of good things from others. So if you have ‘07, it’s worth checking out!
• @heatherforce says she loves Attensa, which I’ve never heard of before. According to the web site it looks like an enterprise RSS reader. Heather particularly likes the plug in for Outlook. (Come on now, who’s really surprised we want to read our feeds with our email?!)
• Johann Burkard uses Bloglines, which is another popular choice, but has also used Rojo & found it to be great, but unreliable.

Social News/Sharing Sites
Ok, this is probably a vague area, as it could cover a lot, but I’m thinking of Digg, Mixx, Reddit, and even del.icio.us and StumbleUpon might fall into this category. However there’s tons of niche sites that could be included like Sphinn and PlugIM, for example.

Out of all of them, I’d say Stumble is my favourite. Actually, by far. It is a killer tool for driving traffic to your blog, AND it’s hours of fun hitting the “Stumble” button. My Stumble is also integrated with my Facebook, so all my friends can see the sites I like. It’s a fantastic tool

(Fun fact: I actually heard about Stumble over two years ago from my hair stylist, she was complaining that her husband stayed up all night ’stumbling’ and I was intrigued to learn more)

I know I could probably go on for days, but I’d love your input: What tools do you use? Why do you use them? What else have you tried?

I’ll update this post with your comments.

*Update*

• Colin brings to my attention that I missed a very obvious category: social networking. (duh!)

Social Networking
I’m still hooked on Facebook, because it’s my primary means of communication with some of my good friends. However, like Colin says in the comments, LinkedIn is a rocking place to be. I’ve pretty much abandoned MySpace. I’ve also joined and played around in a few niche sites like Chapter’s Book Lover’s Community as well as Group Recipes, but they just don’t have the ’stickiness’ of the big guys.

*Update*

• Linda Bustos points out some great niche sites for marketers: Gooruze, Sphinn, and SEOmoz. I’ve been involved a little in all three, so I’ll second the great choices.

As much of an early adopter I am, I sometimes miss the boat on some big crazy trends. One of them was the iPod. No, I’m not kidding. I just got my first iPod ever (a pink nano video) about 2 months ago.

Boy am I ever glad I held out. I mean I feel like I missed years of music listening opportunities, but having video capabilities is just amazing. My favourite thing to do is load up some video podcasts and head to the gym. Before I used to watch TV at the gym and get de-motivated during commercial breaks (Poor attention span sometimes), but now I can watch the content I choose interruption and commercial free!

Here are a few of my fav podcasts (both video & audio) on a variety of topics:

• Ask A Ninja - A classic! It’s a silly show for Ninja enthusiasts.
• Generally Speaking Production Network’s Lost podcast - All Lost fans need to listen to at least one podcast & this one I particularly enjoy!
• Jaffe Juice - Conversation marketing podcast with Joseph Jaffe of crayon. Always loaded with useful information (in fact, that’s how I found out about the GSPN Lost podcast) and he’s got a delightful accent as well which always helps!
• Six Pixels of Separation - fellow Canadian Mitch Joel talks about social media and all sorts of cutting edge marketing stuff
• Wired News - Alt Text Podcast. Seriously, host Lore has made me burst out laughing numerous times. The first episode I listened to, he was dissecting the lyrics to “La Isla Bonita” specifically how it makes no sense.

This is really just a random sampling… but I’m always on the lookout for great new podcasts (especially video ones!) Please tell me your favourites in the comments…

Ok there’s hundreds of fantastic blogs out there that I would love to link to. However, so far I’m doing a bad job of getting around to it. So I’m going to spin this into a social activity and ask for your help on building my blog roll.

In the comments,  let me know which blogs you think belong on my blog roll. Please feel free to drop your own blog URLs, so long as it’s relevant to what I’m talking about here, I’d be happy to link to you! (Also, if you enjoy my content and want to return the favour and link back to web2dotwhat.com, I don’t mind)

Whether you’re interested in social media for professional or personal reasons (or both!) it can get overwhelming. There’s so much information out there, and now even more tools to consume information. If you’re into what’s new and hot in the social media world, you likely know how daunting it can be to stay up to date with everything. At times I feel like if I don’t spend a couple hours each day browsing blogs in my reader, doing some Stumbling or checking out Twitter, I feel like I’m back at square one in the social media game.

However, I have figured out a few shortcuts which can help you stay up to date without giving up sleep time.

1. Bestofyoutube.com - As fun as it is to browse You Tube every day for the funniest or most interesting videos, it can take a lot of time. But how embarassing is it when everyone starts talking about that crazy popular video and you haven’t seen it yet? Well Bestofyoutube.com takes the most popular videos from youtube each day and aggregates it in a podcast. I love downloading these babies to my new Nano and watching ‘em at the gym. (I admit, I’ve burst out laughing once or twice!)
2. Twitter - Get the right people on your Twitter feed and you’ll be amazed how much great info you can digest in a small amount of time (and 140 characters at a time!). Honestly since I got hooked on Twitter, I’ve been opening Google Reader less and less.
3. Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang - Jeremiah is easily one of the most influential and knowledgeable web strategists out there. In fact, Twitter is taking off big time and I think a particular post by Jeremiah on what is now dubbed ‘Twitter Tuesday’ has a lot to do with it.
4. Google Alerts - These handy little suckers help you monitor issues you are interested in. I use it for several keywords that are important to what I do, as well as for monitoring mentions of the company I work for on the web. You could also set up an alert for your own name, to monitor your personal brand reputation. Whatever you use it for GA are super useful, quick and convenient.
5. Alltop - Are you still wondering what an RSS reader is? Or how you subscribe to blogs? Or maybe you get all that but just don’t have the time to seek out all the best resources. Well Alltop is probably the place for you.  It is a collection of blogs on a wide variety of topics. Each topic includes “All the top” blogs on that subject. Check out socialmedia.alltop.com for all the top stories on social media. (Though web2dotwhat.com is not there…yet!)

So there you go, consider it your ‘Coles notes’ to being a social media geek. There’s probably tons more, so drop a comment if you know of something good.

While Facebook still dominates social networking, and LinkedIn/Plaxo for the professional world, as the excitement of social networking peters off (which may not be for a while) we’ll see Facebook slowly fade out, and niche sites slowly take over (though not as noticeably)

If you look closely, a lot of niche sites are already established. However these sites are driven by interests, not mass appeal, so unless you stumble across one, or hear about it from someone else, you may never find them.

One I found today that I’m already in love with is Group Recipes. It’s social networking for foodies and I love it for a few reasons:

1. It’s all about sharing recipes - something foodies love to do!
2. It allows you to not only share, but tag, rate and post your own recipes for a killer online recipe database.
3. When you sign up, you rate a bunch of different ingredients/food types to determine your tastes, that way the content you see is relevant to you.

I think Group Recipes will do well in the ‘foodie’ space. What niche SN sites do you love??