I am in the middle of a new project with some friends and one of them decided to bring in this girl who has the experience we need for the project. She is quite the techie and her inputs have proved very valuable. One thing she kept talking about though is social bookmarking. I am no slouch in matters involving computer and internet technology but I have to admit that I am not very familiar with the term social bookmarking — maybe because the term uses the word “social”, which I am not online. But when she said dropped names like Digg, Del.icio.us, and reddit I realized that I was just wasn’t familiar with the term but I did understand the concept.

This techgirl is champioining social bookmarking as a great way of building links and being a more efficient way of finding related information on a particular subject. I have to agree, social bookmarking has really made it easier to do research or just read up on topics that are of particular interest to a person. It lessens the dependence on search engine results and is more intuitive and accurate.

Social bookmarking marks another step in the evolution of the internet.

Anyone that knows me knows that I am a tool junkie. One of the tools I’m really enjoying right now is SmartPageRank. It basically as allowed me to replace Statsaholic and Yahoo Site Explorer and Pagerank Checker as my main tool of blog health.

They have a great toolbar that I have installed and am using on a daily basis called the Smart Toolbar.

Tools like this will give you a heads up on your site’s inbound link health.

Check it out today: SmartPagerank

I’ve been toying around with the new pMetrics Blog Metric software off and on for a few months now.   Here’s my review:

First of all, pMetrics’ spy function rocks my world.  It gives you an up to the second pictures of your blog traffic.  You can literally “spy” on your visitors in real time.  Now this isn’t for pure voyeurism, but it is a rush.  The Spy App alone makes pMetrics worth the ride.  Each visit AND click on your site gets tracked, and displayed in a constantly updated ticker.  Doing a promotional campaign?  Watch the results in real time.

So why not just stick with Google Analytics?  It’s plenty powerful right?  Well, it may be powerful, but its also cumbersome.  You’ve got to drill down deep to find the stats that you want to see (referrals, keyword searches, incoming links, etc.)  Plus,  Google Analytics is tedious and tiresome for anyone who owns multiple blogs.

pMetrics shines in simplicity and ease of use.  It summarizes your data on just a few pages, so there’s no need to drill down deep into the navigation to find that stats you’re looking for.  That alone is why I prefer it over Google Analytics.

The coolest thing of all about pMetrics is the promise it has for expandability and widgety-goodness.  Want to share your stats with the world?  That’s an option.  Want to pull in an RSS feed of your stats from 10 different blogs?  Again, that’s an option.  View all your stats in one place in an RSS reader.  Save time and effort.  Great feature btw.  The RSS feed also gives you the resources you need to present your stats in a customizable fashion (read: hack your own widgets!).

But that’s really not all.  The people over at  Performancing are promising a future upgrade that will allow for Google AdSense tracking (woohoo!).  Since Performancing is about open source, open community, we can expect for boatloads of cool plugins and widgets to get developed to help promote your blog and also have fun with it.

I can’t say enough good things about pMetrics.  While it isn’t perfect, there’s no doubt that it’s currently my favorite analytics program for blogs.

So go get it.  What are you waiting for?

pMetrics Blog Stats & Analytics

Just a quick observation and commentary on Google’s PageRank metric.

Google’s measure of a site’s importance tells us that the relatively new, and only mildly influential Huffington Post has a PageRank of 8 while the original phenom of online journalism and current driver of the news cycle, The Drudge Report , only has a PageRank of 7.

So according to Google, Huffington Post is more important than Drudge.

Now that’s ridiculous.

Google Maps has become even more customizable. Now when using the service, users have the choice of personalizing and sharing their maps. A new tab located next to your search results give users an array of tools that lets you mark a place, section off areas with the shape tool, create custom directions, as well as add text, images and even video. Logging in with your Google account will allow for everything to be saved and shared with the people of your choice. seroundtable.com has a great review of My Maps with images showing how to use all the new features.