Seriously? It’s October? How did this happen. There are two great things about October. 1) Today is my anniversary. Sixteen years of wedded bliss. And, 2) My birthday is in October. As if you couldn’t have guessed I was a Libra. And Librans strive for balance and harmony and are happiest when their environment is ordered and serene.

So in that vein, let’s talk some new tools that are worth knowing about for finding balance and harmony in managing your social life online:

Gist for managing your relationships.
GizaPage for managing your content.
Read It Later for managing your reading material.

Read all the details in our latest newsletter.

~Wendy

Research tip borrowed (with permission) from Third Hand Secretarial, the best virtual assistant in the world. (She didn’t say that, we did.)

Ever visit a Website that contained some information you wanted to share with someone – if only you could highlight the information. Well. . .you can and here is how to do it:

Visit Awesome Highlighter

• Enter the blog or Website address that you wish to highlight
• Click highlight page
• The blog or Website will appear, with the “Awesome Highlighter” tool bar across the top
• Highlight the applicable content. You can even change the highlight color by using the color chooser on the top right corner of the toolbar
• Add a note to the highlighted information if you choose
• Click on Done
• You are redirected to a page that contains the content you highlighted and a customized URL
• Send that customized URL to your colleagues, business associates, friends or family to show them the parts of the blog or Website you want them to see.

Voila! We can think of some great applications for this. Bet you can, too.

Ever wish you had the time to track down an extra two tickets to see your favorite band, or find the best deal on a new flat screen, or better yet — the perfect dinner date? Check out Yotify.com. Its a free personal web scouting service you’re going to love. They do all the hard work and all you have to do is look through the results. You plug in all your criteria and Yotify will alert you hourly or daily of new postings from your favorite sites like Craigslist, Flickr, shopping.com, linkedin and more. You can get your friends in on the gig as well. Sweet!

As I dug through my email today, I found a note from James Ryley of Free Patents Online.

So, I went to check it out. It’s pretty neat and provides free patent searching, free PDF downloading, allows annotating documents and sharing them, and free alerts for new documents.

I love that James wrote to tell us about it. And I had to share.

A loyal reader asks: Thanks to you, now I get most of my news and information in an RSS feeder. I use Netvibes, by the way. Anyway, there are still lots of sites without RSS. I am so over getting email newsletters or checking sites – say the Drudge Report – every day. What can I do?

Glad you asked.

We recently found a great way to handle that. We mentioned it in our last newsletter, but you might have missed it. And it’s worth repeating. (there are others, but we think this is the bomb!)

Feedity

Feedity is a great service that creates RSS feeds for web pages without a web syndication format. It will take virtually any web page, and convert it into a fully formed RSS document. (the picture below is theirs…)

Feedity makes it so incredibly easy for anyone to set up. You can instantly track and monitor web site changes at a page level. Just create an RSS feed for the web page, and subscribe it in any RSS newsreader (on the web, in a desktop software, or via e-mail).

Feedity also provides for a simple way to build a data “pipeline” using Yahoo Pipes. Check out their Webpage-to-RSS pipe. Without it, it’s not for the meek, for sure!

Good luck.

A loyal reader asks: You’ve told us about Skinny Zips which tells you a ton about each area, but it doesn’t solve my problem today. Now I want to see where the zip code is. Help?

You’ve come to the right place. We love geo-questions!

Here’ s a great one. Check out ZCMap — the ‘ultimate’ U.S. Zip Code mapping utility. You’ll have hours of fun! We did…

I’ve been hearing a lot of good things about Keyword Discovery as an SEO tool. When I was checking it out, I looked to see what they report as the top 10 general searches. The chart below is a simplified version of their data:

So here’s what struck me. Over 13 million people plug myspace into a search engine? That means that there are 13 million people who don’t know that adding .com to that and putting it in the address bar is the way to go? Same with the 13.5 million that type google in and the almost 9 million that type yahoo in and the over 7 million for ebay and 5 million for youtube. Is it just me that thinks this is odd?

The 5.6 million who actually typed myspace.com into a search engine may be the ones I wonder about the most though.

Scratch that. Actually I wonder about the millions of people who type porn and sex into a search engine with no qualifying words. I’m guessing that these folks figure it out, though. Seems to be a category of search where users are motivated to improve their search results.

I’ve been thinking. I see new site introductions and new online tools and new services every day. And, I find sites and people and services that are just new to me. More than one a day is fascinating. More than one a day grabs my attention.

But what will stick? How good does it really have to be for me (or you) to add it to the daily list of things to read, things to do, things to use?

Pretty darn good, I say.

And here’s why. (And I’ll speak for myself here, but I bet you can relate.)

I am full. I use a slew of wonderful tools. I am attached to the blogs I read. I use some fabulous sites that have served and continue to serve me well. And I have no time left unless I quit my job.

So how good does a new site or tool need to be? Good enough for me to dump a current one (so it has to be a ton better or else why learn something new?) or so amazing that I can’t live without it.

It used to be that a ‘good’ site had room in my world. No longer.

What about you?

If you are as creeped out by some of the privacy issues online as we are, check out the new MyDataIsMyData Plugin.

Flugpo sponsored the development of the plug-in to help counteract the collection and sale of personal information. According to the developers, “Selling private information for profit unbeknownst to the user’s is an abuse of their trust and MyDataIsMyData.org hopes to empower these user’s by allowing them to control the amount of personal information that they make visible.”

Good deal.

According to Pew’s just released report, 62% of all Americans are part of a wireless, mobile population that participates in
digital activities away from home or work.

We weren’t surprised.

But some of the stats from Pew Internet Project’s December 2007 survey are surprising and some? Just plain interesting! (And useful, we think.)

• 58% of adult Americans have used a cell phone or personal digital assistant (PDA) to  do at least one of ten mobile non-voice data activities, such as texting, emailing, taking a picture, looking for maps or directions, or recording video.
• 41% of adult Americans have logged onto the internet on the go, that is, away from home or work either with a wireless laptop connection or a handheld device.
• 62% of all Americans have some experience with mobile access to digital data and tools.
• When asked how hard it would be to give up a specific technology, respondents are nowmost likely to say the cell phone would be most difficult to do without, followed by the internet, TV, and landline telephone. Big change.
• Hispanic respondents were much more likely to use mobile data services.

And for the big shocker:

• 18-24 year olds are most likely to use mobile data services. (okay, no shock! But you might be surprised to know that 36% of respondents 65 and older have used cell phones or PDAs for some sort of data activity!