Twitter is a great way to keep up with friends, family, online contacts, and even internet celebrities. It’s also a wonderful way to share news about yourself and your online exploits with people interested in YOUR story. A relatively new webapp called TwitterCounter can help you build a following and track your popularity over time.

TwitterCounter provides the Twitter community with a service that many other forms of communication already have. If you syndicate your own RSS feed, for example, Feed Burner is a quick and easy way to publicize and track the subscriptions to your feed. TwitterCounter is the Twitter equivalent of Feed Burner, automatically generating a counter for your site and giving you access to some fairly reasonable statistical data.

Kwippy is another micro-blogging site that resembles both Twitter, Pownce, and FriendFeed. Kwippy is a convenient and easy way to stay connected with old friends and an even better way to make new friends - the social networking “goal”.

If you see a “Kwip” you like, it’s very easy to find out more about the author and to follow them. Kwippy allows you to interact and converse with short messages such as interesting things you find online or just letting people know what you’re up to or how you’re feeling. Also, the Kwippy commenting system promotes members to engage in conversations, making it a great tool for getting quick feedback or opinions from others.

Recently, Tina introduced us to Springnote, a great Wiki-like application for taking notes, sharing them and collaborating. However, many of us still like to keep our personal lives documented and there are very few places on the net which allow you to do this as you would in real life. Let me introduce Penzu, a great solution if you want to keep an online diary. Springnote is geared toward collaboration, but in theory it can be used to make notes for yourself. Penzu is the exact opposite, it is specifically tuned to individual needs, but some sharing is available.

If you know what Twitter is all about, then you’ll feel right at home in Seesmic. That is, if you don’t mind people actually seeing your face and hearing your voice. Seesmic is essentially Twitter with video.

With Seesmic though, you see not only what people think (or what they want you to believe they think) but you get a window right into their lives, right into their living rooms and bedrooms and kitchens and offices.

I think that’s the best part of Seesmic. It brings out the voyeur and exhibitionist in all of us. Not that there’s any hanky panky going on, at least none that I could find, hard as I tried (wait, did I say that out loud?)

The internet, like anything else, goes through fads. Just like the rest of the world, those fads start at the top with celebrities and trickle down until no one really knows how they got started. Several weeks ago, some of the top names on the internet like Kevin Rose and Veronica Belmont began asking their friends to join them on a new site called Plurk. Slowly but surely, their regular fans on Twitter and Pownce begin to traipse over to Plurk, joining their favorite celebrities in birthing a new social network.

Bloggers, there are lots of things you’ve to keep an eye on, and most of the time, you’ll need the help of different programs for different needs. Sure, there are more web tools for the job, but nothing can get to give you the convenience and speed that desktop applications offer. So, here goes a list of over 30 handpicked application, that can possibly increase a blogger’s productivity.

Desktop Blogging Clients

Post to your blog straigth from the desktop.

Geeks need to shoot files over to someone all the time - video clips, movies, pictures, games distros, software programs etc. Most of the email providers restict you with a max. 10-20 MB attachments so sending files by email isn’t an option. Additionally, there are so many file sharing tools out there that sending large files as an email attachment became rather outdated.

Here you’ll find 5 file sharing services that standout from the rest and incorporate some unique features in one online application. These can be: extremely easy upload/organize/access features, anonymity, browser integration, etc.