SWIX is a newly launched analytics that helps to collect and access data for analyzing your social media ROI. Since most companies are ignore social media at their peril, but now they must try to seek out brand opinion via social media as this is where conversations about brands are increasing taking place on the social sites.

However, measuring, calculating and even defining the metrics is not an easy task, not to mention the investment in terms of personnel, costs and time involved. Although there are variety of social media metrics tools available for free, along side with some social media tracking vendors, but it would be fascinating to get more insight into how your brand spread in different social media applications available on the Web via SWIX.

In fact, SWIX not only providing an analysis of the traffic of your company’s blog, they can helps to track the Facebook fan page, YouTube views and many others since the aggregation of various social sites is easy with a SWIX pod be created for each social media application. To know how your social media marketing campaigns are performing, SWIX provides a visual representations of how user are behaving on your different social site accounts and thus, you can make a measurable and meaningful comparisons. In addition, to better understand your social media spending, a simple table of calculation in terms of spent, cost, and return (by percentage) are also shown.

Currently, SWIX offers few level of plans range from personal membership to corporate and enterprise account. Prices range from $9.00 to $249.00.

As Twitter is growing strong, more and more marketers and online business owners are jumping on this revolution and start utilizing it to generate more sales.

However, it is not easy to become a recognized name in whatsoever niche, although Twitter now is regarded as one of the most effective social media marketing tools an online business marketer can have. In other words, to promote the products you sell online, or post the product details in your tweet, and eventually hoping someone to visit the Web site URL link or product link in your tweet, you need followers.

In fact, I am by no means a pro when come to getting a huge followers on Twitter. But you either can look for some promising social media experts where you can outsource the followers building plan to them or paying a premium for a software that allows you to get thousands of followers.

Tweet Adder, a professional Twitter marketing tool is such a tool among others that can helps you get the job done. With Tweet Adder, you can manage your different Twitter accounts (provided you own a license for the unlimited profiles), and most important, to find the like-minded Twitter followers in seconds. You can define who to follow; by keyword in the tweet, or bio and even by location, and with a one-click add follows, Tweet Adder helps you to send from the default fifty (50) to thousand of sends follow as you wish. In return, you can unfollow a Twitter user who does not follow you back. Additionally, once you get a follower, you can even send the pre-set message to your follower.

Overall, nothing is as feature-rich as Tweet Adder for getting more followers on Twitter at this moment. However, the retail price for one (1) profile for this software is $55 and up to $188 for use in unlimited profiles.

Looking for the best bargain or good deals near your area? If you’re like me, checking the best deals on the Web everyday, then one of the sites you must check out is Postabon.

At first glance, I thought Postabon is one of the sites for finding coupons online, but a second look I found that this site works a bit differently from some other sites in that you can find best deals based on the “location” you select.

Postabon, co-founded by three Harvard students in 2009, is currently offers best deals mainly in the categories of eat, shop, entertainment and misc. Although you can enter your zip code and get results for the best deals in your area, but most of the deals are located in NYC.

As the domain name suggests, this site allows the users to “post a bon”, and in the Postabon system, bon is the alternative name for the best deal. However, unlike other best deal sites that aggregate deals across the Web, all the bons appeared on the site are indeed posted by the users. Besides the deal listings, Postabon also assigns a personal profile to each user, in an attempt to build up a reliable and trusted deal finders community. Of course, as a user, you can give deals the thumbs up or down as well as search the bons by numerous methods, such as city name, zip code, or based on categories or top rated that being offered.

Also, for those iPhone users, the Postabon app can gives you the best deals based on your GPS location.

For bloggers, if you want to build your blog and making it a cash profit machine for you, BuySellAds is definitely a great advertisement network besides Google AdSense.

BuySellAds, actually they are now increasingly popular for the bloggers especially in the Web design and development niche. Currently, there have attracted nearly 1,400 blogs as their publishers in which they used BuySellAds as the ads network to sell advertising banners onto their sites. While it’s free to sign-up and use BuySellAds, but you must add a Web property, i.e. your blog’s URL address and get their approval before you are allowed to set up the ad zones onto your site.

It’s important to note that not every blog are qualified as the publishers of BuySellAds. For those who have rejected by BuySellAds, although the blog you’re running is occupied by rich content and high traffic. Perhaps what you can do now other than wondering about why you’ve been rejected via a standard reply email, you can visit this forum thread and learn more about their selection criteria:

…actually in we are #1 in our main vertical which is web design/development, this means it’s easier for us to find an advertiser for someone interested in this niche. We’re sketching up new verticals in the near future.

Bottom point is, although you’re site might have been fantastic, we try our best to keep our publishers happy.

On the other side, once you blog has been approved, BuySellAds will then acts as a broker between you blog and the pool of advertisers. On the downside, however, they do take a slightly larger cut of the cost of the ads. For instance, if the cost of your ad is $10 (the minimum you can price your ad), BuySellAds will cut 25% as the fee of their service, and the remaining $7.50 will be your payout. In the meantime, you can choose the payment option to be PayPal, Check or Wire Transfer.

Overall, BuySellAds is a perfect ad network should you decide to give it a try.

I have said before the use of Twitter today are more than just status update. In a world where so many tweeters turn to use Twitter for advice, gauge feedback, input, and even breaking first hand news, it’s not easy to grab the prefer username for new Twitter users if they want to make a Twitter presence.

In fact, a new trend has emerged where businesses started to use Twitter as a mean to build a new trustworthy relationships with their customers also contributed to the fact that picking up the username of your first choice would be not easy. Additionally, Google is already indexing tweets. In other words, a SEO (Search Engine Optimization)-friendly username that best reflect the purpose of your Twitter use can help your tweets for future search indexing.

Just like domain name, SEO-friendly Twitter username is scarce since anyone can quickly sign up for Twitter. For this reason, a new app namely Tweexchange has been developed to help you get the most out of the available usernames. To its credit, Tweexchange also will notify you when a Twitter username becomes available again, though a $5 one-time fee is applying, see the below picture.

Think 50% friend-finder, 30% social city guide, 20% nightlife game. This is one of the slogans that location-based social network Foursquare when it first launched on the Web. Now, Foursquare has became a full-fledged social application that allows you to update your current status as well as finding out what your friends are doing nearby through variety of smartphone applications such as iPhone, Blackberry, Palm and even the Android app.

To encourage users to connect to their friends based on location, Foursquare awards points and unlocked badges. For instance, a user can unlock the “Newbie” badge for being the first time to check in by using Foursquare, and after you checking in ten (10) different venues, you’ll earn yourself a “Adventurer” badge. Want more? Try to check in the same place three times in a week, you’re a “Local,” and if you make thirty (30) checkins in a month, then you’re a “Super User.” In addition, you can track your achievements in your own dashboard in order to find out the number of your Nights Out” and any mayorship you entitled to by being the first to visit a new place.

At its core, Foursquare does the two most important things in location-based social network: it displays your personal lifestream, which essentially your location updates and helps you to find new ways to explore the city. Meanwhile, it also helps to connect to your friends in a better way via geolocation in a number of ways like send a “Shout” to your friends, add any tip to a city where you and your friends enjoy together and create a “to-do list” among the group of your buddies.

Video blogging is becoming a phenomenon and its attributes to the fact that the appealing effect that people who view the videos and sympathize with the content especially the video itself is surrounding in a sad story.

However, video blogging has not really taken off as there are few factors such as it’s time consuming to produce a truly compelling video and yet it’s also not easy to create a video blog. But we still notice that most of the mainstream entertainments are wired with video blogging.

To arm you with the video blogging software and hence, you can create your very own YouTube in seconds, Fliggo is a right tool to go for. In fact, it’s inexpensive to create a video blog and become a video blogger on Fliggo.

On Fliggo, you’ve the options to describe your niche video blog title. Also, you can opt to keep your videos private by selecting the closed membership so only the people you invited can view your video blog. Meanwhile, there are few design templates offered by Fliggo, and you can play with it now with the basic account (without paying a hefty premium). But in near future, a premium account type called Fliggo Pro; proposed $50 per month will be launched and many added features such as custom domain name, advanced customization tools are built into the package.

RSS (Really Simply Syndication) is a technology underpinning the popularity of blogging as well as a way to publish and subscribe to blog entries. However, it is unsurprised to learn that many sites still did not have a feed. For the site owners who built their sites not by using the blogging software; the static one, a Web app called rssa (Really Simply Syndicate Anything) can help to solve the RSS creation process.

By entering your Web site’s URL to rssa’s feed URL bar, this service will create a feed for your site through a quick and easy few steps manner. You can set options such as create a feed widget or alerts widget and place the widget onto your site. On the upside, rssa allows you to create a feed based on the category pages, or search pages of your site, but if this service can’t create the feed simply because it couldn’t find any suitable data on the page your specified, you’ll find it isn’t always “Really Simply Syndicate Anything.”

Apparently, rssa functions similar to FeedYes, another service helps to create a feed automatically. However, on a side note, I ran a simple test to create a feed for a static site, but the outcome shown that FeedYes gives you the ability to create the feed based on the static site’s page headline that has news value whereas rssa failed to take care of this.

For the moviegoers, if you have been dizzy with the recent Hollywood blockbuster “Avatar”, now you can rate it as high as possible on MovieRats, a Twitter app with a tweet such as “Avatar” 99% A fantastic movie, bla bla bla @movierats.

With Twitter and MovieRats, tweeters can help to promote or on the other side, bury a movie. As seen on MovieRats, there are Best Movies around, and we were unsurprised to figure out the “Worst Movies” as well, from the pool of the tweeters.

Currently, the leading top movie is “Hackers“. Of course, the reviews are positive, with 454577% and 2 Votes while the aforesaid “Avatar” is only entitled to 124% 7 Votes. In addition, MovieRats offers a special page where you can list the best 10 movies you have seen and give them one-by-one a special comment and rating.

Blogging is hard, especially learn to put out new content regularly. In fact, I’ve been asked by friends that why I still blogging nowadays.

As reported in November last year by Technorati, there are more than 130 million blogs in existence, and many have used WordPress as a blogging software to run their affiliate marketing businesses. Inevitably, combined with the number of blogs on the Web and the amount of time for putting together a better Web writing, a so-called “Powerful autoblogging plugin for WordPress weblogs” namely WP Robot have been developed recently, mainly for the affiliate marketers.

Don’t be mistaken, I’m not promoting this plugin. However in a nutshell, the purchase of this plugin and allows it to start “Bulk Post” onto your blog without the efforts of writing any content might see the death of blogging in the near future.

Just thinking about the endless hours of effort for a blogger to brainstorm, and write a couple of times per week, but with this little plugin, you can create targeted blog posts on any topic without writing anything is totally unfair to the hard-working bloggers.

Clearly, this plugin can helps you to fill-up some spaces on your blog; if you play with it and set it in the plugin’s dashboard to post a new post in every one (1) hour is even interestingly to watch. However, WP Robot will not reward you with the skills for better Web writing.

On a personal level, you probably do not know how I start programming when I started to use WordPress for blogging (for a non-IT background guy till a Rails developer) and from a guy who dislike writing to eventually build up my readership. This plugin certainly won’t help you with this.

I have spent this afternoon reading a CMS (content management system) book entitled, “SilverStripe: The Complete Guide to CMS Development.” SilverStripe, a PHP-based CMS and yet an open source software with its architecture broken into three types of components: models, views, and controllers (MVC) is more than just a CMS, it is a framework that can helps a Web developer to build a wide range of Web applications.

Unlike any popular, and award-winning CMS such as WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal, etc., to install and use it, your Web server must support PHP5. In fact, playing it on my Localhost and reading the book, SilverStripe is “not” an ideal tool for a newbie for developing a content-driven Web site. Although SilverStripe equipped with a powerful blend of features, such as easy to set up, but it does not comes with a robust user-interface, and thus you have to write the script and coding it in order to make it all work. Also, SilverStripe is not easy to modify, not to mention the need to run a single test or to run all tests in the project path.

However, SilverStripe is totally customizable CMS. Since it is largely written in Sapphire, a PHP5 Web framework originally developed to support SilverStripe, and hence it is extremely flexible to extend SilverStripe CMS-powered site to some other Web application such as a full-fledged job board.

Perhaps, you might ask, “So many PHP-based CMS, do we need a new PHP-based CMS?” To be honest, I see the potential of this CMS that based on this kind of MVC Sapphire framework. With SilverStripe, a Web developer can have a bit of freedom to experiment with alternative way to build a content site and not so narrowly focus on building specific document management portal as a whole.

Tech Beijing, which is currently a handful of China tech startups’ reviews, brings me back the passion for writing the China hottest Web news. On the site, the first thing you’ll notice is that there is a directory-like Web startups that have been founded in China. Although the site name is named after Beijing, the Chinese startups from other cities or districts will also be profiled there.

Another thing you’ll notice is that each startup is given brief explanation of what they do, their core product offering in both English and Chinese so that it will allow different segment of the readership can find the content they want more easily.

Stay tuned! And thank you.

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.