Like dictionary and reference sites, spell check Web sites are useful. If you’re a blogger or media publisher, and you want to check your spelling for a word on your site instead of going to Google and use the “Did you mean:” function, you can go to the Spell R Us and use them for the scanning job.

However, Spellr.us isn’t free, besides the free trial version which entitled you to enjoy up to five (5) scans over a period of 30 days, and the maximum Web pages per scan will be restricted to 100 pages as well. By the way, you can hop over to their premium monthly plan for details. While the free trial plan typically helps to scan a maximum of 100 pages, for the single words or blocks of text, you can try to use their online free spell check page.

Currently, Spellr.us is in the version 2 doesn’t just provide spelling corrections; the spell checking errors can be viewed by URL or via the word list. Beyond the spell check, Spellr.us also allows us to add custom dictionaries. For instance, medical dictionaries for medical related sites or new tech jargons for technology sites that their default directory doesn’t handle quite well at the moment.

Overall, the main aim of Spellr.us is to point people to their genuine spelling errors. As long as Spellr.us helps you to catch a few errors that you or the editors of your company fail to do, it can be a trusted source of learning sites where you can learn to write better.

The primary benefit of visiting Bitly.tv, a new lab product unveiled by Bit.ly is to know what movie clips that the world is watching now. As introduced by Bit.ly, “Bitly.tv feeds you the hippest and trendiest videos from around the Web in real-time.” However, there is a lot of hype surrounding the word “real-time.” But at first please don’t confuse it with YouTube Realtime, since it would be easy to assume that the video sites other than YouTube are dead in the water as there are only YouTube movie clips be found on the site.

Clicking on any clip in bitly.tv will pop up a dialog box that has a YouTube movie sits in the left-hand side allowing you to play or pause the clip. In addition, you’ll find the real-time tweet stream coming in via BackType, a real-time conversational search engine on the Web.

With Christmas is almost over and New Year is around the corner, one of good ideas for the bloggers or any site owner to do probably is to check the site’s traffic; the number of visitors that visit the site, the ranking as well as how the site perform when compare to the previous fiscal year.

To monitor and analyze the Web traffic of your site, although you can find many of the free analytics programs on the Web, and yet there’s a new player called Teqpad who want to gain some market share from the existing pool.

Teqpad, powered by Calteq v1.0, i.e. its own proprietary algorithm and is dubbed as the only online analytical tool that gives you Web rank and link rank in a single click. Basically, Teqpad analytics uses calteq v1.0 to extract and calculate data from various freely available resources mainly Google Analytics in order to track the Web traffic of a site. For any URL you enter in, Teqpad calculates the amount of traffic that the site has received in a daily basis and chart it according to the metrics such as traffic metrics, site value metrics, and etc.

Personally, I’m not a fan of the Web traffic tracking services as there are some criticism that most of the established free analytics services can’t provide accurate results. Can the Teqpad, with its internal ranking system able to do it better? Maybe, or maybe not.

One of the great things about Twitter is that it is a place for us to track the popular topics. However, if you’re looking for the local Twitter trends, specifically, the top five (5) trending topics in your city, then you should check out this Happn.in.

Happn.in, actually it is a newly built Web app with Sinatra, a Rails alternative and a Ruby framework good for microapps. Happn.in (pronounced “Happen In”) can help people do everything from track local trends to add value to your city’s Twitter activity by becoming a “Town Crier.”

On the front page of Happn.in, there are two ways to see the trends; you can either see it via a local Twitter trend map or on the old home page which list a succinct list of cities from different regions. To address the issue of “What’s going on near me?” Happn.in provides a graphical interface on the city of your residence in order to see the three (3) main features they offered, the current trends, dignitaries (the Town Crier) and the latest city feed, i.e. a collection of feeds related to a city.

In addition, Happn.in is one of the best ways to track Twitter trends in real-time as the lists of popular phrases for each city are recomputed every hour using a calculation, i.e. the ratio of the [percentage of users who used that phrase during the past hour] to the [mean percentage of users who used that phrase over the past week].

Reading online magazine articles from site to site? Sorry, that’s not convenient for me. Now, a startup called Maggwire is offering a new way for you to read the magazines. Maggwire, dubbed as the new way to “experience magazines online,” it is designed to wire you to a list of articles from 660 magazines across the Web, at the time of my writing.

On the front page of Maggwire, it aggregates magazine articles that cover any topic under the sun, from golf, and yoga to tech or celebrity news. All the magazine articles resolves around topics, and included with each topic, there are sub-categories that form around a main category. Clearly, the Top Articles part of the site is virtually identical to many other news sites on the Web such as Digg and Techmeme whereby the article with most popularity, i.e. five (5) stars will sit in at the top of the site.

In fact, Maggwire offered a number of features that will shorten the amount of time you spend on the site each day. For the articles you’ve read, you can either rate it so the rating color will turn from yellow to red, and next time when you come across this article, you know you can skip to other articles until you find something interesting.

Also, Maggwire comes with additional features such as the ability to share the articles via the addthis plugin, and hide a certain magazine based on your viewing experience. The “Hide Magazine” feature, although it is certainly unique, it’s likely to appeal to a very small segment of online readers who want to make their browsing articles faster.

Various Twitter third-party apps have been developed and now, with oneforty, it acts as a one-stop apps directory so that we save ourselves the hassle to remember all the name of the Twitter apps (applications).

Oneforty, this site actually is a site of more than a simple Twitter apps directory. On the site, it actually providing users with everything Twitter apps, from the Twitter apps on desktop, or mobile phone to promote a business with a Twitter app. Currently, oneforty houses more than 2,000 Twitter apps; with this number it could prove to be a handy alternative to another Twitter apps directory called TwtBase that I profiled in March this year.

After you log in to oneforty with your Twitter credential, you can either register yourself as a developer or as a user so as to suggest a newly built Twitter app to them. For the registered developers, one of the cool features is to claim a Twitter app or get your newly built Twitter app be found on the site. In addition, once your app has been listed on the site, you can start to receive money through the donation on the Twitter app page.