@dvocable

I have seen web design companies and online marketing agencies coming out with their online properties geared towards mass usage. So why shouldn’t a PR agency? So now Waggener Edstrom has come out with twendz, an online tool that you can use to find out the tone of the tweets around yourself, your brands, or a topic.

I ran my username on twendz and it brought up the latest RTs and replies to me on Twitter and summarized that 11% of my conversations are likely negative, while 59% are positive and 30% are neutral.

How did twendz come up with this? According to its site, ‘twendz uses a keyword-based approach to score tweets. Meaningful words in each tweet are compared against a ‘dictionary’ of thousands of words that are associated with positive or negative sentiment; each word receives a score that, when combined with the other scored words, allows twendz to make an educated guess at the overall tone of a tweet. After twendz scores a handful of tweets matching certain criteria, it extracts key terms, assigns a tone rating to each of those, and assembles them in a word cloud.’

Sounds good. My only concern is if twendz can figure out the context in which a particular word has been used. For example, ‘spam = negative’ might be questionable when I received a reply about somebody else like ‘Mr. Toby spams’. I mean I’m not the one talked about negatively here.

This aside, the tool looks promising (it’s still in beta) and something one can used to quickly see how people are talking about a brand or topic on Twitter. Check up your client on it.

All those Twitter aficionados there: tired of checking all the Twitter ‘manage it better’ tools mushrooming like crazy everyday? Try something different. Though not so useful, this certainly is a feel good tool.

I’m talking about the Twitter Mosaic that you can use to create a mosaic just like the one I have created below using my Twitter friends avatars. A whole bunch of nice folks there. Thanks for the conversations.

You can use the tool to have your mosaic (friends or followers) printed on a mug, tshirt, bag, or mousepad.

By the way, I haven’t counted the number of people on the mosaic below. Seems some have been missed out. Not my fault. Still, we can connect on Twitter, can’t we?

This is my other post on Twitter: Twittermania: 140+ More Twitter Tools!

• Twitter Links for February 2009: Social Media and Twitter Resources : The Get Smart Blog – This list is a collection of social media and twitter resource links that were shared and retweeted by @GetSmartWomen in February 2009. In this list you will find the best, most interesting, and most useful of our favorite shared Twitter links.
• 4 Multi-Search Engines You Should Consider For Your Home Page – Some search engines that are not Google but you want to try out.
• WeightMirror – See a weight loss of up to 50 lbs from your own photo in seconds! – This fun tool lets you see how you will look when you take off 10lbs or 50 from your weight.
• 7 Ways to Keep Fresh Content Flowing On Your Blog – This is a question that most bloggers face at one point or another – particularly bloggers who have been blogging for 6-12 months.
• 99 Things You Should Have Already Experienced On The Internet Unless You’re a Loser or Old or Something – Like the name says it all

• PeopleBrowsr – You take all your social media profiles form Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. and put them up on a dashboard and play jiggle, analyse, cross-promote everything around. ..a la Radian6 dashboard style. You don't want to miss this one.
• Vacatweet – Twitter vacation auto response – Send vacation response while you are on holiday, when your friends DM you on Twitter.
• Public timeline – MicroPlaza – With so much of Twitter noise, this tool helps you makes more sense of the plethora of links you get from your friends on Twitter, nicely formatted.
• My Social Buttons – A neat solution to your needs of social networking sites' icons for display on your blogs and sites.
• Vunky Search – Most of us have a version of Photoshop in our computers sometime or the other, and all we could do with it was perhaps brighten/crop an image. Of course sometimes, we look for tutorials online. Now Vunky Search is one place you won't want to miss to find good tutorials.

• Twe2 – Get your Twitter Alerts via SMS worldwide for Free – Twe2 is Free Twitter SMS alerts that you can use to get free alerts on your mobile phone, and customizable too.
• Twe2 – Get your Twitter Alerts via SMS worldwide for Free – Twe2 is Free Twitter SMS alerts in Europe and beyond.
• Tynt – Tracer – When your content is copied, Tracer automatically adds an attribution link to claim it as yours.
• Twippr – Pledge cash by Tweet – Twippr is an interesting concept where users can use Twitter to pay other Twitter users cash using Twitter. The simplicity might just click.
• feedly: a magazine-like start page – Feedly pulls in your Google Reader List and displays the latest content in a easy to read newspaper style format. Lots of options to play around with. Smooth sharing options to Twitter and other social sites. I’m hooked on to this one.
• TinyChat.com – Create a free chatroom – Meebo changed the chat landscape by allowing users to chat without their desktop IMs, and now Tinychat is doing it again by allowing users to chat without any restriction of user IDs, etc. Simple create a room and start chatting.
• Delicious Toolbox: 80+ Updated Tools and Resources – Here are over 80 tools for everything from your mobile device to your blog, and more, that can help you view your bookmarks in new and unique ways, backup your bookmarks in a secure location, take your bookmarks with you on the go, blog about your most recent saves, and then some.
• How to Get Retweeted – The best measure of someone’s quality as a Twitter user is not the number of followers but the amount of retweets. Guy Kawasaki provides 6 practical tips to get retweeted on Twitter.
• 11 Free And Useful Open-Source Alternatives For Designers – Opensource, Free and Useful Online Resources for Designers and Developers – Listing here 11 Free And Useful Open-Source Alternatives For Designers in which most of them are cross-platform.
• Top 100 Creative Writing Blogs | Best Colleges Online- From blogs that focus on writers still trying to make it in the publishing world to those providing updates from best selling authors, you’ll find all kinds of information geared towards improving and informing your creative writing.
• 18 Tools I use as a Designer & Blogger | Fuel Your Creativity – Cool web tools that you can use to quickly learn web designing and be more creative.
• 15 Things I Wish I Had Known When I Started My First Blog – Neil Patel shares 15 tips to remember when you start your blog. A must for every newbie entering the blogoshere and for regular bloggers too.
• 12 Twitter Stream Aggregators To Make You Smarter | Online Marketing Blog – 2 cool Twitter post aggregators to get you smarter on Twitter
• 9 Common Usability Mistakes In Web Design | How-To | Smashing Magazine – ere are 9 usability problems that websites commonly face, and some recommended solutions for each of them.
• HOW TO GUIDE: 60+ Great How To Sites and Resources – Here’s a run-down of more than 60 great how-to sites and guides covering everything from building a mashup to being more productive, creating a website and more.
• 100 Free and Useful Open Courseware Classes for Web Workers – Learn-gasm – These free open courseware classes can help any web worker get a step up on the task with courses including web design skills, media arts, photography and video, writing and communication, technology, and even classes to help freelancers get ahead with marketing and entrepreneurial topics.
• 42 Free Online Magazines for Designers | Graphics - There’s a huge pool of free design magazines on the net; we meant those softcopy magazines you can either browse online or download (.PDF, .SWF) for offline viewing. Not only they have high quality content, each issue released is also free.

Are you one of those who are paranoid about sharing your emails? Or maybe you simple don’t want to share your details when looking for job candidates on Twitter? We can go on thinking but if you want a nice little contact form for yourself just like you see in websites, Whspr is a tool you need to check out. All you need to create a form is your email. You can set the form to last till 365 days. No account creation. No hidden prices. It even has a captcha on the form to save you from spam. I quite like the idea of it

Sometimes viewing pictures in rows and columns can be dull. Luckily, there are a number of services dedicated to making the photo search and viewing experience more interesting.

Check out my latest post on Mashable for 8 sites that provide a new approach to searching and looking at pictures online.

Also one that came on the comments that I would have loved to include is Tag Galaxy. Check it out.

I have created more than a hundred PowerPoint presentations till date – for new business pitches, for my clients, and for internal office purposes. I love creating my PowerPoints with pictures on every side. Over time, I realize that I have used so many pictures, those I sourced from the Internet and other places and thought was creative and nice, that I wished I had a master folder on my PC containing all those pictures. Then every time I create a new ppt, I can quickly go to that folder, choose a good suitable picture, and use that, instead of going online and searching the photo stock sites. So there will be no more the ‘Ah! I can use that press conference picture on this slide but where did I used that picture before? I have to remember’. This will save so much time.

I needed a software that would search all the PowerPoint files on my computer, and extract the images out of them. After some searches, I found the answer. The solution is called the MS PowerPoint Extract Images From Presentations Software. It is a small file that you can download and easily install. You can load individual ppt files or an entire folder (like the D drive for example) on the tool and it will start opening each ppt file and extract the pictures to a location you specify. Very neat.

The software comes at USD 19.99 for the full functional version license. The unlicensed version just works well also though.

We all are aware of Google News Alerts, that nice service from Google News that keeps us sending email alerts on a particular tag/word we specified. Now take that into a new level with Alerts.com. This new service supports not just news alerts but more than dozen types of alerts including birthdays, gas price, corporate press release alerts, forecasts, horoscope, jobs, wake up calls, flight alerts, traffic alerts, hotel price alerts, RSS update alerts, and more. You can set up a to do alert as well.

Aother nice feature is that Alerts.com can send you the alerts through email, SMS, or voice on your mobile phone, home phone, or work phone, depending on how you want it. If you prefer, you can set up a ‘Do not disturb’ time period when you don’t want any alerts.

Currently the SMS and phone alerts seem to be working only in the US, but I am sure they will soon support more carriers globally. Despite this, the service is neat and I am really starting to like all my alerts configured under one service.

There are hundreds of Wordpress plugins out there and you can use as many as you want. However, there are some plugins that are must-used for all. This is  a list of 11 such plugins that you just can’t live without.

In no particular order…

Akismet – This plugin that seemingly seem to do nothing visible has protected my blogs from over thousands of spam comments. Need I say more.

You need your Wordpress.com API key to activate akismet. You can get it by registering at Wordpress.com and by going to your profile page.

Feedburner Feedsmith – Sooner or later, you are going to burn your blog’s feed on Feedburner, and when you do that, this plugin will make sure all the default Wordpress feeds of your blog points to the Feedburner feed. For example, http://advocable.com/feed will always point to the Feedburner feed – http://feeds.advocable.com/newposts

Google Sitemaps – Ah! Who wouldn’t want to use Google Sitemaps. This plugin creates that necessary sitemap for your Wordpress blog effortlessly.

Wordpress Mobile Editon – Today, people are increasingly using mobile phones to browse the net, and you don’t want your site to look garbled on their handsets. This plugin displays the content of your blog in a mobile phone screen friendly format that is easy to browse and read.  this is one of those just-installed-and-forget-it plugins.

Maintenance Mode – When you are fidling with the design and layout of your blog, you don’t want your visitors to see you site all crippled. Right? This plugin will display a simple note to your site visitors saying your blog is currently undergoing scheduled maintenance and so please try back after some time. You, as the admin, can continue to work and see how your site actually looks like on screen.

Subscribe to Comments – When I comment on blog post, I ask questions and give my views on a particular topic and expect the post author or other readers to reply to my comment. Now since I can’t be bookmarking or remembering all the comments that I keep making, I’d love it if the replies are somehow sent to me. This plugin does exactly that by giving me the option of subscribing to the follow-up comments when I am leaving a comment on a blog. For a blogger, this is a good way to keep their readers engaged.

Wordpress.com Stats – Now there are so many stat providers like Google Analytics, Sitemeter, Statcounter, Woopra, and more, but I haven’t seen any that is quite as nice as this one. Though not quite so comprehensive, this plugin provides all the key stats you need to know about your blog on your Wordpress dashboard itself. No need to add any javascript that will slow down your blog’s page loading.

All-in-One SEO Pack – This plugin is no longer supported but is still one of the best out there to ensure that your post titles, descriptions, and keywords are in place, duplicate content are in check, and other on-site SEO optimisation is done.

Similar Posts – You can use this plugin to display a list of 5-10 or more similar posts below your blog posts. This helps in atrracting your readers to other similar content on your blog and perhaps make them stay longer on your site.

Popularity Content – This plugin helps you to display a list of the most popular posts on your blog based on certain criteria you have set. Displaying such list is important as your visitors know what are the best your blog has to offer.

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade -  Wordpress keeps updating itself to new versions every now and then, and who would have the time and patience to delete some folders from the server, upload the newer versions, and take care that nothing is wrong in all these deleting and uploading. And plus the reinstallation. You can escape all this by getting this plugin do the upgrading for you automatically.