According to Facebook, 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news blogs etc) are shared each month on the social network, with no sign of slowing.

But how can you manage the flood of information? Here’s is a list of tools and services available, which help you manage your websites and blogs. If I’ve missed any obvious ones, or indeed obscure ones, please feel free to leave a comment.

• Blog Grader shows you how effective your blog is at marketing your brand and see how you stack up against other blogs out there.
• Blogtronix is an advanced social networking tool and micro-blogging site, which helps people in a community, company or group exchange short multimedia messages across the web. Blogtronix is best suited for internal communities, such as companies who are looking to help their employees connect, ask and answer questions, and share work and content.
• Disqus is a social-commenting tool. Disqus allows your readers to include media such as YouTube videos in their comments, receive alerts when their posts have been responded to, and reply directly from their email.
• FeedBurner is a popular analytics package, now owned by Google, which allows you to analyse, optimise, publicise and monetise your RSS feeds.
• Google Analytics, although not specifically for social media, it can provide invaluable insight into which social media channels are driving traffic to your site. In the latest version Google now provide scripts and reports to track Facebook Likes, Twitter “tweet this” and Google +1.
• IntelBuilder Social Media Platform is a service that allows you to manage your website or blog by automatically updating your social networks when you update your website content, distributing to RSS feeds, submitting to bookmarking sites and tracking your readership.
• IntenseDebate, much like Disqus, is a comment system that enhances and encourages conversation on your blog or website.
• Janrain is a tool that allows visitors to your site to easily share your content across their social networks. Janrain also lets visitors sign in to your site with their Facebook, Twitter or other social accounts and tracks their behaviour to help you provide a personalised experience for each visitor.
• Sharetronix is run on the same platform to Blogtronix but is more suited to external communities. In addition to being a micro-blogging site, Sharetronix integrates with Twitter, Facebook and RSS feeds, allows for one-click publishing and is SEO optimised so that your content will be easily found by interested parties.
• Twitterfeed is a tool that monitors your RSS feed and updates your Facebook and Twitter accounts when you have a new blog post.

Publishers looking to stay connected with their users and acquire new users have plenty of Facebook tools at their disposal to do just that. Here are a few tools that’ll help you manage your Facebook account:

• Buddy Media is a platform that allows you to quickly and easily manage your Facebook presence by scheduling your posts and news feed messaging, helping moderate the comments on your page, and customising the look and feel of your page.
• Conversocial, meant for small to medium-sized businesses, Conversocial lets you set up automatic moderation to delete or flag posts based on keywords, drives all comments to your email inbox, sets up a team workflow and provides limited analytics.
• Facebook Insights is an obvious tool, but if you are managing a Facebook fan page, before you begin looking for more in-depth tools, make sure you check out your Facebook insights page to see how many people are participating, liking stories or leaving comments.
• Mediafeedia is a free service that helps you schedule posts, manage multiple accounts, set up administrators, create custom tabs and notifies you by email of activity on your fan page.
• Sysomos Facebook Page Central offers auto-moderation, email notifications of posts, a dashboard monitoring key metrics and sentiment, and identification of top fans and themes.
• Vitrue is a tool that may not streamline all of your social networks like other tools, but they excel in making the most out of your Facebook presence. Vitrue helps you moderate the comments on your Facebook page, send targeted messages to people who have “liked” your company and more.

If I’ve missed any obvious ones, or indeed obscure ones, please feel free to leave a comment.

So, what tools are available? Here are a few tools that’ll help you manage your Twitter account:

• Backtweets, a tool dedicated solely to Twitter, provides reach and impressions stats, alerts you whenever someone tweets a link to your website, identifies influencers and integrates with Google Analytics to see how Twitter activity is affecting your website traffic.
• BrandChirp is a service, which makes it easy to find the people you should be following. You can search for new followers by location, who they are following and keywords that they have recently tweeted about.
• ManageFlitter is a service that makes it easy to manage your followers and remove those that are no longer relevant or tweeting.
• Mentionmap is a visual tool that maps out your Twitter network so you can see who you interact with most and what they’re saying. It’s a cool tool to find relevant people to follow.
• Proxlet is used to filter the relevant stuff on Twitter. When you’re being bombarded by a few overly enthusiastic friends or by chatter about a conference you aren’t attending, Proxlet allows you to mute users, filter tags, or block apps to cut out the noise. The best part? It works with other Twitter applications like TweetDeck.
• Qwerly, “People Search for the Social Web”, lets you search for people in order to help you get a feel of their social presence. They also have a cool feature that allows you to add in the contact details of everyone you are following.
• Salesforce for Twitter is a web-based CRM tool is now allowing existing customers to pull tweets from their Twitter account into the tool, making it possible to assign leads and monitor activity as you would with other contacts in the database.
• SocialOomph allows you to automatically follow those who follow you, send direct messages automatically to new followers. Though this is essentially a Twitter tool, the professional edition handles Facebook as well.
• Sulia, formerly TLists, allows you to search public Twitter Lists, but the stats that accompany the lists are great and allow you to see how often the list pushes tweets and what they’re talking about.
• Twaitter lets you schedule tweets, set recurring tweets, create and manage your “tweet calendar” and even translate tweets, all from its web interface.

If I’ve missed any obvious ones, or indeed obscure ones, please feel free to leave a comment.

Monitoring is only one piece of the puzzle, however. It’s important to find out who is saying what, and where the conversation is happening so you can respond appropriately.

Here are a few tools to help you manage multiple social channels:

• Awareness Social Marketing Hub is a platform ideal for larger social media campaigns with multiple people monitoring and executing the program. In addition to aggregating social network information, the Hub allows marketers to set up workflows in order to coordinate efforts across a marketing team.
• CoTweet is ideal for companies who have multiple people contributing to their social media campaigns. In addition to organising and monitoring your Twitter and Facebook pages, it allows you to assign updates and social streams to members of your team based either on their expertise or who is “on duty” at a certain time.
• Expion is built with multiple-location business or franchises in mind. Expion allows corporate offices to oversee and manage each of their locations’ individual social media accounts while still allowing store managers or franchisees to have some control over the account. This helps brands maintain continuity across locations while still allowing for regional-based promotions or content relevant only to the local stores.
• HootSuite is a tool that allows you to manage multiple social media channels through one dashboard. If you have a company with more than one contributor to your social media program, HootSuite is a good solution.
• NutshellMail is a tool, much like TweetDeck, which helps you track all of your social media channels. Instead of constant updates, NutshellMail sends you a single email per day describing your accounts’ activity.
• Ping.fm is the most popular site for aggregating your social media channels. It allows you to simultaneously update accounts like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Flickr through their web interface, text message, email or instant message.
• PostRank aggregates what is happening with all of your content across the web in a constantly updated feed. This way you can see what type of engagement your content is getting across different channels right as it happens.
• Seesmic allows you to manage your Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Ping.fm, Foursquare and Google Buzz accounts all from one simple interface. Whether you want to access your social networks from the web, a desktop application, or your mobile phone, Seesmic has a solution.
• Sprout Social manages multiple social networks from one dashboard, allowing you to optimise your outreach in each channel, identify people interested in your brand and convert them to loyal consumers.
• Syncapse SocialTALK helps you control your presence across different platforms, manage multiple social media accounts from one platform, establish multiple user access levels, and monitor incoming traffic.
• thisMoment, via their recently introduced Distributed Engagement Channel (DEC), uses thisMoment’s publishing platform to combine their design, your content and multimedia user generated content into one “channel” that can be pushed to many different social media outlets.
• TweetDeck, like HootSuite, provides a way to track many of your social media channels on one dashboard. It can be a time-saver and a productivity-enhancer, assuming you’re not easily distracted.

To avoid undesirable content in the search indexes, webmasters can instruct spiders not to crawl certain files or directories through the standard robots.txt file. Conversely and importantly, webmasters can also notify the search engines about the existence and importance of pages with a sitemap.xml file. (Both files are placed in the root directory of the domain.)

Fortunately for the webmaster, the major search engines provide various tools to help manage both Sitemap and Robot files.

To gain an understanding of both ‘protocols’, I’ll discuss them briefly below.

Sitemaps (Inclusion Protocol)

The Sitemaps protocol allows a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling. A Sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site. It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently. Sitemaps are a URL inclusion protocol and complement robots.txt, a URL exclusion protocol.

The webmaster can generate a Sitemap containing all accessible URLs on the site and submit it to search engines. Since Google, MSN, Yahoo!, and Ask use the same protocol now, having a Sitemap would let the biggest search engines have the updated pages information.

Sitemaps supplement and do not replace the existing crawl-based mechanisms that search engines already use to discover URLs. By submitting Sitemaps to a search engine, a webmaster is only helping that engine’s crawlers to do a better job of crawling their site(s). Using this protocol does not guarantee that web pages will be included in search indexes, nor does it influence the way that pages are ranked in search results.

The following is a cut-down version of the sitemap.xml for this website. WordPress, via a plugin, automatically updates this file each time a new post or page is written.

<urlset xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">
<url>
<loc>http://www.simonwhatley.co.uk/</loc>
<lastmod>2008-10-08T14:50:16+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>
http://www.simonwhatley.co.uk/big-city-little-people
</loc>
<lastmod>2008-10-08T14:50:16+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.1</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

More information about sitemaps can be found on the Sitemaps.org website.

Robots (Exclusion Protocol)

The robot exclusion standard, also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol or robots.txt protocol, is a convention to prevent cooperating web spiders and other web robots from accessing all or part of a website which is otherwise publicly viewable. Robots are often used by search engines to categorise and archive web sites. The standard complements Sitemaps, a robot inclusion standard for websites.

A robots.txt file on a website will function as a request that specified robots ignore specified files or directories in their search. This might be, for example, out of a preference for privacy from search engine results, or the belief that the content of the selected directories might be misleading or irrelevant to the categorisation of the site as a whole.

The protocol, however, is purely advisory. It relies on the cooperation of the web robot, so that marking an area of a site out of bounds with robots.txt does not guarantee privacy. Some web site administrators have tried to use the robots file to make private parts of a website invisible to the rest of the world, but the file is necessarily publicly available and its content is easily checked by anyone with a web browser.

For example, the following tells all crawlers not to enter four directories of a website:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /private/

Exclusion can also be achieved on a page-level basis using a Meta-tag. This is a tag that would be placed in the HTML head of of a web page. The robots attribute controls whether search engine spiders are allowed to index a page, or not, and whether they should follow links from a page, or not.

A common example could be as follows:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
	"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr" lang="en-GB" xml:lang="en">
 <head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">
	<title>Simon Whatley</title>
	<meta http-equiv="robots" content="index,follow" />
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

A word of caution though, Meta tags are not the best option to prevent search engines from indexing content of your website.

More information about Robots.txt files can be found on the Robotstxt.org website.

Webmaster Tools

The top 3 search providers all have their own webmaster tools admin interface. The Google offering is the most advanced, but it’s good practice to use and submit information to all three.

Links to their services are provided below:

• Google Webmasters
• Yahoo! Site Explorer
• Live Search Webmaster Centre

Ask doesn’t have an interface. However, you can still ping their Submission Service using the URL http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap= in conjunction with your sitemap URL.

Further Information

• Sitemap Generator
• Sitemap 3rd Party porgrams and websites
• Webmaster Toolkit

If you’re already working with video on the web, an online editor is fast, easy and free. In theory, these services could bring video editing to people who would otherwise never engage in it. People already engaging in video editing can benefit from automatic software updates and the sharing made possible by online communities.

Here’s a brief look at some of the services out there in the ether.

JumpCut

Jumpcut, acquired by Yahoo in 2006, lets you upload video, photos, and audio, or import from Flickr or Facebook, and edit using a Flash interface. Jumpcut is the most developed of the editors, allowing you to add a long list of effects, transitions, and captions to the videos. It also incorporates fine grained control of trimming and audio levels (uploaded background audio and voice). The complexity of the interface makes it great for detailed edits and mashups, but borders on being too heavy an application for the internet.

Checkout the Jumpcut website.

Eyespot

Eyespot is a fully featured editor like Jumpcut. It has a drag-and-drop interface that lets you upload video, photos, and audio and then add transitions, effects, titles, and music. The editor isn’t as attractive and easy to use as Jumpcut’s, but Eyespot offers a good deal of free media sets from partners like The Colbert Report, Public Enemy, and Dreamworks Pictures. Eyespot’s white label editor is becoming available on more and more sites, with the NBA being a prime example.

Checkout the Eyespot website.

Cuts

Taking a slightly different tack, Cuts is a great example of a Web 2.0 “mash-up”, where two online applications are merged. In this case a video is taken from YouTube, MySpace or Google and you cut, loop, add preloaded sound effects, and insert captions to enhance the original. Editing is straightforward, consisting of changes to the sound, caption, and navigation levels for the video. Every edit can be re-cut, embedded, and emailed. In the future, Cuts will be expanding into simple editing for digital movies and TV shows.

Checkout the Cuts website.

Motionbox

Motionbox is best known for deep tagging videos, but they also have an editor that is ideal for trimming your Motionbox content and joining the videos together.

Checkout the Motionbox website.

Photobucket

Photobucket leverages the most recent Adobe Flash tools. Unlike other services, users can “mash up” video clips with audio files and photos, and add effects and transitions.

Checkout the Photobucket website.

You can read the full press release on the Web Standards Project website.

Widening the collaboration between standards experts, who are also product experts, and Adobe is an exciting step forward in the maturation of the Web. This will hopefully lead to full standards support in not only Adobe-based products such as Dreamweaver and AIR, but leading browser and web editor suppliers such as Mozilla, Microsoft and Apple.

Effective web content management requires the capability for business leaders to take full control of the web as an interactive platform, rather than just treating it as another publishing medium. Keeping website visitors satisfied is a tough job. Currently, few corporate websites succeed with static, lifeless pages that lack interactivity. In contrast, pioneering websites, such as Amazon, Google and eBay set user’s expectations high with their compelling and dynamic content.

Because of these pioneering websites, the average visitor now expects targeted and personalised interactions with each and every company with which they come into contact on the web. In recent years the web content management franchise has expanded significantly beyond the 1990s paradigm of creation, management and publishing of content and other ‘resources’. As a result the tools are changing.

Ismael Chang Ghalimi has created an interesting list entitled Office 2.0 at IT|Redux. On this list, Ismael details a wide variety of web based business tools from bookmarking to business intelligence, calendars to contacts, databases to development tools, and beyond. What this list demonstrates is a shift towards new ways of data management, personalisation and targeting. New ways to interact with each and every interaction.

A recent survey from the Economist Intelligence Unit found that, despite early scepticism, “serious businesses” are starting to see that social networking technologies are not just for consumer sites such as YouTube and Facebook, but may also provide a major way for other brands to attract new customers and boost revenue.

 A compelling web experience is no longer based around simple web interactions, but around interactive tools.  The uptake of these tools, however, has been limited and we are only just seeing applications, such as wikis and blogs, join the corporate fold and become a generally accepted business tool.

This article was inspired by a great blog post at Aviva Directory, entitled Grade Your Website: 31 Free Online Tests.

Below is a compendium of tools I use on a regular basis to test website I work on, based on Aviva Directory’s headings (incidentally they list the same tools I use regularly).:

Code Validation

The WDG HTML Validator is an excellent tool for identifying syntax errors on pages driven by markup languages. There is also an option to recursively check for errors on every page in the website directory, which is invaluable when checking large, dynamic websites.

The W3C Link Checker searches for and identifies broken links for a given URL. The tool specifically checks that all the links are de-referenceable, no links and anchors are defined twice and warns about invalid http and directory redirects.

Accessibility

Watchfire’s WebXACT is a must use tool for all serious designers and developers. The tool lets you test single pages and generates a very detailed report on the quality, accessibility and privacy of a website.

Speed

Web Page Analyzer from Website Optimization is an excellent tool that calculates page size, composition, and download time. The script calculates the size of individual elements and sums up each type of web page component (objects, CSS, images etc). Based on these page characteristics the script then offers advice on how to improve page load time. The script incorporates best practices web site optimisation techniques into its recommendations.

Browser Simulator

Browsershots is a tool, created by Johann C. Rocholl, which takes screenshots of your website in various browsers and platforms including Firefox and Internet Explorer on Windows, Firefox and Safari on Mac OS X and Iceweasal and Konqueror on Linux. When the user submits a URL it is added to a job queue. Unfortunately the queue requires you to wait up to three hours before retrieving your screenshots, but the results provide a clear indication of how the website will be received by different user setups.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO Workers SEO Analysis Tool is an extremely useful tool that analyses an assortment of page features including meta tags, keyword density and load time. A user simply submits a URL for testing and the report is returned.