If you have surfed the Internet long enough, you have probably seen some of those websites that come with shiny footer bars that let their visitors submit their stories to top social media websites easily. Thanks to Web Informer’s social bar, you can get the same effect on your website, no matter what platform you are running your website on.

Web Informer’s toolbar is pretty easy to install on any website (HTML, WordPress …). It has some of the top social networking websites that you would want your visitors to submit your content to. The sleek look and feel is not too shabby either.

Web Informer’s social bar is expandable. While your visitors get to submit your content to Facebook, Twitter, and even Mixx from the main bar, they can use the “More” link button to submit your website to services such as Tumblr, Friendfeed, Diigo, and much more.

Those of you who prefer adding a drop-down social button to your website instead of a footer bar can always go with the Default Theme.

Webmasters can develop their own social bars using Javascript. If you don’t want to touch any code, solutions such as that of Web Informer’s can be helpful.

The concept of chatting may not be new these days, but it’s still one of the best ways to connect with others and share information. If you are a webmaster for a popular website, there is no reason not to offer your readers the chance to chat with you once in a while. Besides, you can always provide you readers with the tools and let them go from there.

Social chatting is quite popular these days. That’s essentially chatting for Twitter and Facebook users. There are many tools that can add such functionality to your website. The nice thing about social chat websites is that they make it so easy to integrate chat rooms into any site. They are easy to set up too.

Those of you interested in adding chat functionality to your website should check these 5 social chat services out:

Tinychat: a light-weight and fun chat platform that lets your visitors connect with you using their social credentials. Supports video chats too.

Nurph: a cool social chat service that lets you start a chat room on Twitter. It allows you to add it to your website and share your chat room with the world. Takes just a couple of minutes to set up.

Donut Chat: a freemium service that can be used to set up chat rooms easily. If you are willing to pay a bit, you can host your chat rooms at a URL of your own choosing. Supports media sharing and third-party app integration too.

Skysa: adds a social bar to your website. Offers you the chance to enhance its functionality by adding more apps. You can use it to connect with your readers and even give them the tools to promote your pages.

Twalkin: a very innovative service that lets you have a voice chat or two with your followers on Twitter. If you are tired of typing, this service is for you.

Chatting with your readers is a great way to build a more solid community around your website. The above services are mostly free and let you connect with your visitors in a convenient fashion.

Please feel free to add your suggestions in the comment section.

There are plenty of people who spend hours of their time on Twitter and Facebook on a daily basis. Add to that hundreds of useful tools that are available for these networks, and you may end up spending all your days on these sites. There are plenty of Twitter tools that can help you get the most out of this social network. Some can help you increase your followers while some others can keep track of your favorite topic. You are never going to be out of options.

If you are struggling to feed your Twitter addiction, here are 5 tools that could help:

Twalkin: a very cool service that lets you connect and start talking with your Twitter friends. If you want to have a private chat with your friends or announce something to a selection of your followers, Twalkin is must try.

Tweeterview: a great tool to interview people on Twitter with and watch other people’s interviews. Helps keep things organized while you interview other people.

Klout: an all powerful tool that dissects your profile and lets you know whether you are making a difference on Twitter. It can show you what areas you need to work on to take your Twitter to the next level.

jotabl: gives you an easy way to add a Twitter shout-box to your website. Just add it to your website and have your visitors connect with you and tweet right from your site.

Tweetwally: Tweetwally gives you an easy way to create a Twitter wall based on a hash-tag, user-name, or keywords. Sign in, and you can even share your wall with others.

There are plenty more tools around for Twitter. Not every tool is going to be useful for your situation, but the above tools do you give you the chance to connect more effectively with your visitors and boost your presence on Twitter.

Unless you have been completely ignoring what’s going on in the social media, you have probably heard of AllTop and PopURL. These are great places that you can find new RSS feeds and top blogs about almost any topic. Trying to clone such services is not as easy as it looks, but you can always start your own site sharing feeds that matter to you the most. If you are a blogger or a niche portal owner, you can use such feature to provide more value to your visitors. Thanks to Aggregator theme for WordPress, you can start sharing your favorite feeds with the world without spending too much money.

Aggregator theme is a widget based theme. Users can add all kinds of feeds and as many of them as they prefer. While you don’t want to add too many feeds to this theme, it should work for most people. You can add video, blog, and photo feeds to your widgets. So you have the opportunity to build a content heavy Aggregator without doing too much.

Credit: Templatic

Aggregator is pretty easy to use and customize. It’s almost free too. You don’t want to build your business around it, but it can give you visitors an additional tool to keep up with feeds that you have found useful. It’s like having your own personal AllTop.

Everybody who has tried iPad in the past is familiar with its lacking multi-tasking capability. If you want to be on Twitter and keep an eye on your Facebook updates on your iPad, you are going to have to keep opening and closing apps. That’s where Sociable for iPad comes into play. It’s a social media center for your iPad, giving users the opportunity to keep track of developments on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, and Flickr.

Sociable is really 6 apps fit into one. For starters, it enables users to read and update their Facebook status on iPad. Writing on walls and commenting on photos is possible too.

Sociable supports Twitter too. It lets iPad owners manage multiple Twitter accounts, post tweets, retweet, and even view tweets on a map. Support for Digg, Flickr, and Reddit is nice to have too.

Those of you who are involved in more than just one community are going to love this app. Sure, you could have the same capabilities if iPad supported multi-tasking, but that is not happening in the near future. Besides, Apple’s definition of multi-tasking is very different from ours. With Sociable, you won’t have to worry about that.

There is no question that Google Reader is the best feed reader around today. It offers a ton of features and makes it easy to keep up with your favorite blogs. That does not mean there are other solutions out there for RSS junkies. Favit is an exciting service that brings a more social aspect to your reading experience. The service connects you with your friends and lets you share connect with them and discover what their likes too.

Favit feels like a hybrid Twitter/RSS-reader. It not only gives you all the tools you need to follow your favorite blog, share your top stories, and get in touch with friends, it keeps track of your activities too. Your stream shows your followers what you have been doing, where you have left comment, and what items you have shared.

What’s nice about Favit is the data it collects on how its users interact with articles and other people. That information could come handy when you are ready to expand your network or just want to do a quick research. It’s also nice to be able to share items publicly and in private.

Favit is not going to replace Twitter or Google Reader for me. But it’s still a nice service to consider using if you are tired of Google Reader. The interface still needs a bit of work, but Favit has a great potential.

Let’s face it. These days you can’t just rely on books to stay on the top of your industry. While you don’t want to let your RSS feeds make you less productive, you do want to keep up with them as much as you can. Plenty of people, including yours truly, use Google Reader to get the job done. It’s quite a powerful tool and has a ton of features for saving and sharing information with others. It can get a bit overwhelming if you have too many feeds in your account. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could customize the look and feel of Google Reader to go through the new content more effectively? Good Noows is an exciting news reader application that lets you create your own mini newspaper online, getting a better sense of the top stories in your industry.

Good Noows not only lets you keep track of your favorite website, but it also can accept your own RSS feeds too. So you can customize the information displayed on your front-page. You can even create new news sections (think of it as categories or folders) and add your favorite feeds to them. I also love the fact that you can customize Good Noows layout easily.

As you can see in the above screen-shot, you can add new sections as well as new sources of information to your account. You get plenty of layouts to choose from too. The service lets you change the font size and translate your news to a language that you can understand (if English is not your first language). You can also share your favorite stories right from your front-page.

I would not use this service as my main RSS reader. But it is an invaluable tool if you want to identify stories that are worth reading quickly. The service needs a bit of work and hopefully more features will be added to it in the future. The concept is awesome though.

It took only a small while before people realized there was something wrong with Twitter yesterday. Once the site starts loading slow, and you see the big whale image on your screen, you know something’s happening at Twitter. Apparently, the company had some server issues and has fixed most of those issues by now. A year ago, it would have taken people a while to get informed on any outages. These days, Twitter can’t get away with that. Not when it has millions of people who can’t stop tweeting.

Twitter’s status site was full of news about the state of the network (most of which were not good news).

Twitter has gotten much better these days when it comes to handling the load that it gets from all the tweeters. But it has ways to go to become perfect in that regard. Perhaps what’s more distressing is seeing so many people complain about what they can’t do when Twitter should be used as a tool and not a life-style.

Twitter may be struggling from time to time to keep up with all the traffic that it gets. But that is not going to stop the team from implementing new features. Twitter is in the process of introducing its own URL shortening feature that will not only help users save some characters, but it will reduce the chances of people getting scammed on Twitter.

I don’t know about you, but I will continue supporting third-party URL shortening services out there. It’s never ideal if one company is handling all your data, even if Twitter can use your data to improve its features. Twitter may not be perfect, but it does not have to be. Twitter being down for a few hours should not alter your strategy much anyway.

Those of you who have been blogging for a while know the importance of using visuals to get your point across in your posts. Spicynodes is a cool visualizer that lets you demonstrate what you have in mind to your readers in a more dynamic fashion. All you have to do is break down your thoughts and put it all in nodes.

Spicynodes is free to sign up for and quite easy to work. Once you have developed an outline or have the concept you want to demonstrate to others broken down, you can use this service to present your ideas in a more dynamic fashion. You can add and customize nodes easily. You can change the style of your nodemap easily.

Of course, if you are willing to pay for this service, there are plenty of other things you can do with your nodemaps, including integrating them into your very own website and taking advantage of the API behind this service. Spicynodes is overall a pretty easy tool and very effective for those who want to communicate with the world in a more visual way (catch a demo here).

The first step to get involved in social media is by starting your very own blog. Everybody has something to share with the world (not talking about your lunch adventures though). After all, you don’t want to participate on Twitter and Facebook without having a plan .When you have a blog, you can use your social profiles to drive traffic to your blog and solidify your community.

Every blogger would tell you that getting people to comment on posts can be challenging. Top bloggers have mastered this art. Those bloggers who do not get a lot of traffic on their website, will have a tough time getting people to participate. The best way to do it is by making it easy for visitors to comment on each post, add their own content, and rate what others have to say. That’s where Intense Debate comes in. It’s a powerful comment management system by the people behind WordPress that turns your comment system into a powerful community tool for your readers.

Intense Debate is very easy to install and adds a whole other dimension to your blog. It lets your visitors to comment on your blog by using their Twitter, Facebook, or Intense Debate account. Of course, they can do it the good old way (with a name and URL). Since Intense Debate is compatible with Akismet, you can deal with spam comments more effectively as well.

Intense Debate has a bunch of plugins that you can activate to take your comment section to the next level. For instance, you can enable video comments or give users the ability to add images or YouTube videos in their comments. All of that is offered to you for free.

If you are an aspiring blogger who want to take your blog to the next level and get your reader more involved, you can’t go wrong with Intense Debate.