URL:

http://www.topsy.com

What is Topsy?

Topsy is a search engine that uses Twitter’s tweets to determine the popularity of a link.  This means you can quickly find trends and hot topics across the internet using Topsy.  Instead of basing its results off of a much slower determining popularity system such as search engine bots and link popularity.  Think of each Twitter user itself as a website.  Their popularity helps determine the popularity of topics tweets across the Twittosphere.  This is an excellent way to find and discover things on the internet, different from the conventional search engine method.

What you may not know about Topsy

Since Topsy is based on Twitter tweets, you can find newer content faster on the internet.  This means you can search results using their time filter (found on the left after a search query) and get newly popular topics within the last hour!  Amazing.

Watch this quick video and check it out for yourself:

URL:

http://www.alternativeto.net

What is AlternativeTo?

AlternativeTo will help you find alternative software applications and websites to some of the most popular ones you may already know.  The best thing is, you can use AlternativeTo to find popular free replacements for programs such as Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Office!  Next time you’re looking for software options, use AlternativeTo to see what other programs are similar and popular.

What you may not know about AlternativeTo

You can quickly login with your Facebook account and start sharing your favorite program.  Not only that, you can search for keywords related to the type of program you’re looking for and see which ones are most popular.

Here’s a short video on AlternativeTo.net:

URL:

1. Google Maps: http://maps.google.com
2. Google Books: http://books.google.com/
3. Google Squared: http://google.com/squared
4. Google Sets: http://labs.google.com/sets
5. Google News Timeline: http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com/
6. Google Similar Images: http://similar-images.googlelabs.com/
7. Google Audio Indexing: http://labs.google.com/gaudi

What is Google?

I would hope by now anyone on the internet has at least heard of Google, if not, here’s some history…Google Inc. is an American public corporation, earning revenue from advertising related to its Internet search, e-mail, online mapping, office productivity, social networking, and video sharing services as well as selling advertising-free versions of the same technologies. Google has also developed an open source web browser and a mobile operating system. The Google headquarters, the Googleplex, is located in Mountain View, California. As of March 31, 2009 (2009 -03-31)[update], the company has 19,786 full-time employees. The company is running millions of servers worldwide, which process about 1 petabyte of user-generated data every hour. Google conducts hundreds of millions of search requests every day. (via Wikipedia)

What you may not know about Google

Google is more than just a company trying to organize the world’s information and making it easily searchable.  Google offers a variety of methods of obtaining content on the internet, such as the 7 methods mentioned above.  Furthermore Google also offers a variety of web tools and services such as email clients, advertisement options, web analytics, and ridiculously much more.  Its actually quite remarkable what can be done with Google.  I’m done talking, go play.

Here’s a video on 7 Google search techniques that are really cool:

URL:

http://www.bing.com

What is Bing?

Bing is Microsoft’s new search engine.  Bing is an intuitive search engine that tries to assist you in better searching.  It does this by offering suggestive terms and providing you content preview of your search results to help you refine your search of content on the internet.

What you may not know about Bing

Bing has multiple search features to not only search for articles and news related content.  Bing features an extensive search for multimedia such as images and video.  Bing has a collection of search refining tools for images and video.  For instance, you can search images and filter out images of people only by head shots.  Or hover your mouse over video results to see a preview of the video.  Bing is putting up a strong effort towards Google and their domination of finding content for users on the internet.

Here’s a quick video on Bing:

URL:

http://www.slideshare.net

What is Slideshare?

Slideshare allows its users to upload, share and collaborate on powerpoint presentations and Microsoft Word documents.  Many times speakers at differente events and seminars put up their presentations on Slideshare to share with its viewers.  This means you can search thousands upon thousands of powerpoint presentations from many popular events and seminars held worldwide.

What you may not know about Slideshare

Not only can you find powerpoint slides and Word documents, you can favorite and tag them to quickly create your own library of presentations.  Furthermore, on the right side of the presentation is the option to view related presentations to further your learning.  So stop using Google and Wikipedia as your only news source and start being more intuitive on your content learning.  Download powerpoint presentations on your topics and continue to broaden your knowledge presented by others.

Here’s a quick video on Slideshare:

URL:

http://www.wikipedia.org

What is Wikipedia?

Wikipedia is a collaborative encyclopedia.  This means that all of the content on Wikipedia is written and updated by it’s users.  Virtually anyone can add/remove/change content on Wikipedia.   Having this kind of power with collaborative content.  The contents of Wikipedia is very large and continously expanding, quickly.  You can find virtually anything about nearly any topic on Wikipedia.

What you may not know about Wikipedia

Wikipedia has a feature for logged in users called My Watchlist.  This allows you to monitor different pages on any subjest you want.  Since content about different topics on Wikipedia is updated so frequently and fast, its possible to use Wikipedia as a news source.  So by adding your favorite topics to your Watchlist and monitoring the changes, you can get the newest knowledge about a topic your interested in, directly from the authors of Wikipedia, millions.

Here’s a quick video of Wikipedia:

URL:

http://www.teamsnap.com

What is TeamSnap?

TeamSnap is a tool to help manage your sports team online.  Whether you’re looking to manage your kids soccer team or your adult hockey team, TeamSnap makes it each to keep track of player availability, team and player stats, schedule, whose paid up and more.  Even capture pictures and highlights and post them to your teams TeamSnap page.

What you need to know about TeamSnap

TeamSnap allows you to customize your team’s page.  This is a great way to give your page its own unique look and feel, to match your team’s logo and colors.  Create custom user fields such as nicknames to give your TeamSnap page an even more unique approach.

Here’s a quick video on TeamSnap:

URL:

http://www.quicksprout.com

What is QuickSprout?

QuickSprout is a blog written by Neil Patel whom has started to largely growing website analytics tools, CrazyEgg and KISSmetrics.   The blog has internet business tips that Neil has accumulated over the past few years and his work online.  He shares his secrets and tricks on blogging and how to make money and generate traffic to your business’ site and/or blog.  A must read blog for any internet entreprenuer out there.

Here’s a quick overview video of QuickSprout

URL:

http://www.justin.tv

What is Justin.tv?

Justin.tv, founded in San Francisco by Justin Kan, is a network of diverse channels providing a platform for lifecasting and live video streaming of events online. The original Justin.tv was a single channel that evolved into the Justin.tv network of thousands of diverse channels.  Justin.tv follows the tradition of sousveillance, i.e. the recording of an activity from the perspective of a participant in the activity. Justin.tv builds upon other previous similar projects also featuring 24/7 live Internet streaming (read more at Wikipedia)

What you may not know about Justin.tv

It doesn’t take any special software to install on your computer, just a webcam and/or a microphone and you start to broadcast yourself live on the internet.  Justin.tv also allows you to archive your recordings for later viewings.  Each channel has a chat room which allows current viewers to chat and discuss the events in the video.

Here’s a quick video on Justin.tv:

URL:

http://www.wordsplosion.com

What is Wordsplosion?

Wordsplosion is an image blog showcasing misspellings and bad grammar on signs, cards, flyers and anywhere you can find words in everyday world.  Each post is a different image of something with bad grammar or a misspelled word.  Some images are quite humorous and it just goes to show you that there are a lot of people out there that shouldn’t have passed 4th grade English

What you may not know about Wordsplosion

At the bottom of each image is a quick link that you can click which points out the bad grammar and/or misspellings.  So if you can find it yourself, click this link and it will tell you what’s wrong.

Here’s a quick video on Wordsplosion: