Yup, you've guessed it. It's time for another meme. Mr. Olthuis has so generously tagged me to participate in the top 5 social media tools meme. This was actually in good time because I had been pondering such a post about sites that I couldn't live or blog without. Let the meme begin.
It's no surprise that the first in my meme list would be Techmeme, the ultimate technology meme tracker. It's an innovative, automated site that scours the net for small webs of links to see what people are talking about. For example, if someone on Cnet publishes an interesting story and 10 bloggers discuss and link to it, Techmeme will find those links and feature them in a cluster. Techmeme is the first site I go to when I want to find something captivating to read or blog about.
While it's not as large or well-known as Techmeme, Blogniscient's technology section, has always provided me with some links and stories I can't find anywhere else. This roots from the fact that unlike Techmeme, Blognisicent (as the name implies) only finds content from blogs which leads to some unique content. The only bad thing about Blogniscient is that it takes some getting used to typing in the URL.
The technology section of Megite is also a powerful blog tracking site similar to Blogniscient. It is also like Techmeme in the fact that it clusters together links of other blogs' discussions to each story. Megite even has a feature where you provide it your OMPL feeds list and it can make a customized version of Megite based on your feeds. I use Megite for those few but great times where I've found an amazing article that I couldn't find on any other site... that and they're always linking to me.
Del.icio.us is the extremely popular social-bookmarking service now owned by Yahoo!. I regularly check the popular page on del.icio.us for a tasty link. Most items on the popular page aren't exactly technology related and web development articles seem to fare exceptionally well. However, I must say that del.icio.us popular can serve up some neat links, even if they have nothing to do with tech.
I don't think it's possible to have such a list of social media tools and leave out digg. Digg can always give you something interesting to grok but as of recently more and more of the articles on digg are of lesser quality, which is why digg is on the bottom of the list. Blogs aren't seen as viable forms of media on digg, whose users bury any upcoming story coming from a blog as if it were child's play. By not letting top blogs hit the frontpage, digg is really missing out on some quality content.