In no particular order, what follows are 14 of the best Twitter tools and resources on the web!

Just Tweet It – service described as providing Twitter users the ability to “find other Twitter users like you!” Just Tweet It is a “Tweeter Directory” and allows you to add yourself to directories based upon interests that consist of groups of like-minded Twitter users.  In addition, you can list yourself into relevant directories so that people will be able to discover you!

Mr. Tweet – service described as “your personal networking assistant/agent [that] helps you expand your network easily.”  Mr. Tweet aims to provide this service in 3 ways: by getting you relevant followers, helping you discover great people relevant to your current needs, and improve your Twitter usage via useful statistics.  To start, you simply follow @MrTweet

Twitturly – service “for tracking what URLs people are talking about as they talk about them on Twitter”.  Twitturly lists the top links as well as the active tweets that posted the link and is a good tool for discovering what is hot on Twitter.

Favrd – a service that displays the recent highly favorited Tweets.  It lists the tweet that has been favorited as well as a look into the Twitter users who chose to favorite the tweet.

Tweet Later – “productivity tools for busy Tweeple”, Tweet Later allows you to set up alerts and track keywords in the public Twitter stream, schedule tweets, send automatic thank you notes, manage multiple Twitter accounts and more.

TweetSum -  a tool aimed to help you investigate potential connections.  When somebody new follows you, you can use TweetSum’s tools help you decide whether this person is somebody you should follow back or not.

Twellow – “a service to help Twitter users find people to follow.  Twellow categorizes and organizes Twitter into hundreds of niches to make your searching easier.”  Twellow is a search engine for searching Twitter bios, names, and locations.

Twitterholic – a service that provides Top Twitter user rankings and stats.  More than anything, this service is amusing and provides you with interesting data.

TwitPic – a tool that “lets you share photos on Twitter”.  It is heavily used and many Twitter clients have built-in support for it already.

Twapps – “archiving the best Twitter apps”.  A useful service for those Twitter users looking for new and/or unique Twitter applications.

Twittown – an alternative to, and perhaps better than, Twapps.  Twittown is “The Apps and Widgets Community and Forums” and serves as a great resource for discovering new Twitter Apps and Widgets.

Less Friends – simply put, a tool that provides an answer to the question: “Do the people you follow on Twitter, follow you?”  This tool can be very useful for making sure you do not accumulate to many people on your Following list.  An alternative to less friends is FriendsOrFollow.com

Twemes – a service that is “particularly useful for keeping up on the real-time activities associated with a live event”.  Twemes follows tweets that have embedded tags that start with a hashtag (#).

Top Twitter Clients from TwitStat – Provides live data on the top Twitter clients being used to manage Twitter accounts.  Very useful tool for discovering powerful Twitter clients.

Since the beginning, I’ve taken pride in providing daily updates and keeping the site advertisement free. In order to keep the site advertisement free I have employed a very conservative layout that really keeps the server from working unnecessarily hard.  Daily updates, however, have been a bit more of a challenge lately. I’ve gone through some life changes that you can read and see a little about on my personal blog if you wish.

Anyways, things have calmed down as much as I am willing to let them which means that I will do my best to provide daily updates once more. Feel free to shoot an e-mail to karmarogue [at] gmail [dot] com if you have something you’d like to see posted here.

I vow to continue to provide random, entertaining content without dishing out advertisements and will do my very best to return to the daily updates format in the coming week.

I believe in the naked approaching to blogging. I have no problem exposing to all of my readers how much traffic I get, what my thought processes are, and other web development stuff that other web site’s would rather keep private. A little shy of two months worth of blogging all by myself and I get around 1,500 unique visitors every day.

I now have an Alexa ranking of 258,467, which is not at all terrible but neither is it amazing. It is also definitely reflective of how Alexa works. Alexa assigns websites a traffic ranking based on the amount of visitors that visit a website that have the Alexa-bar installed. I repeat: Alexa is a measure of how many visitors go to a site that have the Alexa-bar installed. I have a stake in other sites more focused on web development that have better Alexa rankings but get less traffic. The reason is simple: They attract more tech-savvy visitors with the Alexa-bar installed. Regardless of how Alexa is determined, I fully anticipate that my Alexa will drop below 100,000 within the next two months. Why am I so confident?

The bottom line is that Karma Rogue is not simply a site for my family and friends. I have created Karma Rogue to entertain a large amount of people. True, Karma Rogue has seemingly no direction whatsoever. Contradictory to what certain web sites would tell you (hint hint Lorelle on WordPress) there is very little reason to make a site with a simple, niche, acute focus. Site’s with such a focus are much easier to make, will catch on much faster, will experience much greater repeat traffic, and will attract a far more loyal readership. Blogs that focus on very particular things – like Fishing Lures, for example – are more likely to be successful than blogs with no focus. They are able to corner a certain market that otherwise has nowhere else to turn to. But – so the fuck what?

Blogging is about one thing: Entertainment. That is it. Bloggers like me do not have the attention-span for creating and maintaining web sites about things like Fishing Lures. We are naturally mentally all-over-the-place. And do you know why that does not matter? Because bloggers like me attract readers that are likewise guilty of lacking focus. We ADHD folk are not alone. We should not be afraid to create blogs that let loose. But if you choose such a chaotic route, there is something you must keep in mind. The key to pulling this random-style off is providing users with a highly usable index. If you are going to focus on just about anything, make sure people can scan your homepage for exactly what interests them in a short amount of time.

I have had far greater success with my blog than most other bloggers and there is a reason why. Although usability and SEO are important to me, they have nothing to do with what I’ve learned about successfully blogging and are not reasons why my blog is viewed by thousands daily. The reason for Karma Rogue’s success is simple. Karma Rogue is a success because I have determined that Karma Rogue is a success. Karma Rogue is a success because I am happy with what it is and what it has become. And, perhaps most important of all, it is a success because it does not try to be something that it is not.

Readers are able to pick up on the passion of writers. You simply cannot be a successful blogger if blogging does not make you happy and you have no passion for it. In this regard, it is very similar to almost any profession. If you really want to know how to be successful, I will tell you: Do what makes you happy and do not expect to find any secrets that make what you do any easier. I have learned that blogging carries with it the same exact same requirement necessary for success at anything — Passion.

“How do you get people to read your blog? This guide will tell you how to gain readers, how, in effect, to be heard. It discusses how to approach blog content, design, launch, writing your blog, marketing and revisions.”

Read on for my dissection of this informative, albeit lengthy, article.

Several interesting points to consider in the beginning:

• “Creating a popular blog is, for better or worse, like being popular at a party.”
• “It is possible to launch a blog without a plan. But the probability of success is much lower.”
• “What you will notice is that, in all successful blogs, there’s something in it for the author.”
• “Don’t just pick something and say “I’m going to write about that.” Study yourself, and write about the things you’re already thinking about.”
• “…without some discipline, one day [of not posting] will slide into a week, one week will slide into two, and then you’ll have no readers because you aren’t writing anything.”
• “Design makes your content accessible, and that increases your readership.”
• Use a liquid layout (one that expands or shrinks with the browser window) if possible
• Ping blogging services like Technorati

According to the article there are several design aspects popular blogs have in common:

• Easy to read
• Load quickly
• Have a unique visual identity
• Have light (usually white) backgrounds
• Simple
• Use font sizes well
• Use color well

The article also lists speed as an important factor and warns against too much content on your homepage – especially images and doodads such as gadgets.

Once you’ve considered all of the above it’s time to generate an information flow:

• Compile RSS feeds from sites you already read (and be on the lookout for others) using an RSS aggregator.
• Use Yahoo! Groups or Google Groups for groups that interest you.

It is important that you don’t simply reword other content for many reasons. As pointed out in the article, “What you want to do now is to add value to the item you are writing about.” For example, this writeup of the original article is saving you the pain of reading through the lengthy article by providing quick access to the main points.

Concerning your writing style:

• “As time goes by, and as you consider more items, you will settle into your own style.”
• “…over time develop a critical stance with respect to the material you read, a frame of reference that assists you in understanding, putting into context, and assessing resources. This is a good thing, and you should watch for it as it develops in your writing. Don’t force it; just let it flow as you respond to individual items.”
• “Eventually, you should acquire something like the following habit: if it needs to be written, blog it.”

But even doing and considering what is described above won’t get you a single reader because none of it has much to do with people knowing you exist. How do you get the word out there?

• “If you have business cards, put your blog address on your card.”
• “If you send an email, make sure you have a proper signature that includes… your blog address.”
• Check out this excellent Best Blog Directory and RSS Submission Sites article
• When reading other blogs, leave comments that includes your blog address.
• “After having written a few posts, new bloggers should send an introductory email to those bloggers they perceive to be leaders in the field.”
• “Go to conferences.”

Some of the article’s final advice suggests to highlight certain content:

• From time to time you will produce something of extraordinary importance or value. When this happens (and only when this happens) make a special effort to ensure people are able to find it.
• Send an email to some prominent bloggers in your field advising that you have something of extra value. Keep the email short, offering a clickable link directly to the item and a short paragraph describing the content.

And one final note: “Listen to your readers. Respect your readers.” After all, your readers are what you blog for.

Full Article

Full Article

Tips, topics, and discussion on the video:

• Don’t spam words
• Start off new blogs in a blog directory
• Write with keywords in mind
• Use categories that are good keywords
• Dashes are best (filenames)
• Use alt tags on your images
• Keep browser compatibility in mind
• Check out your site on a cell phone
• Easy to find post creation dates
• How-to change hosting
• How-to move to a new domain
• Google Services: Webmaster Console, FeedBurner, Custom Search Engine
• Get noticed in the world first, and in google second
• Get known by being creative, creating tutorials, insightful analysis, create controversy, make lists

My blog is powered by WordPress 2.3.

Most of my posts have been written with the Firefox plugin: ScribeFire.

Until blogging, Filezilla was my ftp application of choice. Now I rely on a Firefox plugin for ftp’ing as well: FireFTP.

As I said in a previous entry, the WordPress theme that I use is Rapid Access – built from the ground up for speed, ease of use, and no php-bloat.

I have three active plugins: Akismet for handling comment spam, bbPress Integration to synchronize my bbPress forum with my WordPress blog, and SEO Title Tag because I’m a SEO whore.

The links to digg, del.icio.us, and facebook are generated by a FeedFlare script – however, it only seems to be working half of the time and I have been unable to receive any support from the FeedBurner staff.

I’ve found several cool sites that I think I’ll be able to learn from: Lorelle on WordPress, BloggingPro, and blogHelper.

Finally, the philosophy I employ when doing anything with my blog is SIMPLIFY SIMPLIFY SIMPLIFY!

When I learn more, so can you.