While part of using a social network like Facebook or Twitter involves recommending articles and blog posts to read, there’s a lot more that’s going on these sites – between photos, what your friends had for lunch, and conversations – the recommended reads can sometimes get lost in the midst of all of the noise. Using a site that defines itself solely as a way to find and make recommendations on what to read is one way to cut past all that noise.

With the amount of information online, it often becomes hard to cut through all the noise and get straight to the stuff that you’re interested in. If you want to generate relevant content online and find a way to cut through that noise – and make sure people find what you’re sharing – there’s no better way to do that than with content curation or aggregation. There are several ways you can go about this.

Between the two of them, Pocket and IFTTT are excellent services that do their part in making their users more productive. Pocket gives users a one-stop shop to access all of the content – articles, videos and more – that they want to save for later viewing. Combine that with IFTTT, the ultimate automating service, and you have the ultimate way to automatically save content to your Pocket account, and more.

Tumblr is known as being a great blogging platform for visual content, and is a photographer’s smorgasbord of just about everything you could possibly imagine. That said, there’s also an incredible wealth of content that can provide inspiration to writers, poets and book lovers. We’ve already introduced to you to 10 creative blogging ideas to try out on Tumblr if you’re suffering from writer’s block, and you can now combine them with these 8 blogs.

Keeping track of the many social networks you’re a member of can certainly be a challenging task. Between Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, Flickr, and more, we all probably have at least two or three accounts that we check on a daily basis. If you’re an avid user of RSS readers, one solution to keep up with notifications, is to load them all into Google Reader.

There’s no denying how much easier smartphones make our lives – and one of the things that has become all the more easy thanks to the wide variety of apps available – it’s online shopping. Using nothing more than your phone, you can buy just about anything from a car to a notebook, from a computer to a home. And you can also use that same phone to make sure that you’re getting the best deal.

Have five minutes to kill? What better way to spend that time than to watch an fascinating or informative TED Talks video. There’s a lot of great content available to watch on TED but sometimes you have just a few minutes – and rather than waste that time playing a game or checking your email for the 20th time in two minutes, watch a TED video instead. We’ve put together a list of eight videos.

Social networking site Pinterest can be pretty addictive, with good reason, but it can also be an incredibly useful site. While we know it’s easy to waste many an hour on Pinterest, being less than productive, there are a also lot of great ways you can use Pinterest to get more organized, or to get noticed.

When it comes to getting noticed on Instagram, there are basic rules to follow as would be the case with any social network – post regularly, interact with users, include an interesting description with your photos that will get other users attention. Beyond that, there are a few Instagram-specific ways to ensure that you can gain more followers, gain more likes, and pretty much win at Instagram.

Have you ever found yourself in a position where you’re trying to get files out of the cloud and send them to friends or colleagues via email? You probably end up having to download the file to your computer first and then uploading it once again in an email. With Chrome extension Cloudy, you can finally get rid of that unnecessary first step of downloading it to your desktop.

While there’s no limit to iOS photo frame apps that make it easy to jazz up your iPhone photos with cool frames and collages, the latest app to hit the iTunes App Store comes to us with a unique twist. SymbolGram, the new free app, brings unique frames, allowing you to create interesting shapes, words and more.

If you don’t want to download a desktop app to use as your Twitter client, there are a few interesting browser-based apps and extensions that can do a great job of offering you all the key features needed to interact with your friends and followers. Persona, a free Chrome app, is not only a great Twitter client, but also offers users a slick interface to keep up with their Facebook accounts as well as RSS feeds.

While Instagram has finally offered users a way to view profiles from the comfort of a browser, it has yet to offer up the full Instagram experience. A lot of third party developers have jumped in to fill that void (with the exception of course of being able to upload photos to Instagram). Share.me is the latest option to join the ranks of Ink361, Instadash, and many others.

There are several free apps available for adding text to images using your iPhone, but one of the first apps to offer this feature rolled into a social network is Quipio. The free iOS app makes it easy to add text to images, create messages using typography, and interact with other users sharing their thoughts and images through the app. No design skills whatsoever are required to use Quipio.

If you’re based in the US, or have found a workaround like Tunlr for those of you who aren’t, keeping up with your favourite TV shows and movies on the free service Hulu is one of the best ways to watch TV. The most popular shows are available on Hulu, and you can watch them pretty much any time you want. That’s not to to say that the service couldn’t be better. There’s a few things about Hulu we’re not crazy about.