These are my bookmarks for June 10th from 11:40 to 11:40:

• whos.amung.us – Getting stats couldn't be any easier. They're free and there's no registration! Simply copy the html code you see below and paste it into every page you want to track.
• whos.amung.us – Getting stats couldn't be any easier. They're free and there's no registration! Simply copy the html code you see below and paste it into every page you want to track.

These are my links for June 7th through June 8th:

• Channel 4 beats BBC in race to place its archive online for free | News – The broadcaster will become Britain's first to offer its archived content – beating the BBC, which screens programmes for seven days after they air via its iPlayer service.
• Fergiland – Your place for ploughs, parts, grass cutters and mowers for your vintage Ferguson T20 or MF35 tractor.
• Boomtown – xbox – Xbox 360 – LONDON & DUBLIN – 28 May 2009: Millions of entertainment fans will soon have the way they watch TV transformed, as Xbox 360 and Sky announce a ground-breaking partnership which will enable, for the first time ever, premium live television to be watched through a games console.
• Tweet My Gaming: Tracking game popularity trends on Twitter. – Tweet My Gaming is a real-time feed of video game conversations happening on Twitter.
• Scan Your Books And Search Them On Google – One of the most useful, if often-overlooked, features of Google Book Search is the ability to enter your own books and create a personal library which you can then search if Google has scanned those books. (And chances are it probably has). If you are trying to find a passage or a factoid you once read but can’t remember the book no matter how hard you wrack your brain, the ability to search your personal library can come in handy. Except who wants to enter each book one at a time?
• Watch Internet TV – Live Streaming Video From Livestream.com – looks like a webcam service – interesting.
• A Map Of Social (Network) Dominance – Even on the Web, world dominance must be achieved one country at a time. While Facebook has long been the largest social network in the world, and should soon pass MySpace in the U.S., it is not the largest social network in every country. The map above created by Vincenzo Cosenza resembles more a game of Risk, with Facebook sweeping across the globe from the West.
• Friends of Ferguson Heritage Ltd. – The Friends of Ferguson Heritage Ltd. exists to encourage and assist enthusiasts in their interest in the engineering achievements of the late Harry Ferguson. The club made a healthy start, and has grown rapidly since the first magazine was published (issue one was for Spring/Summer 1994), and the excellent magazine (pictured right) is now received three times a year by members. The internet came too late for Harry Ferguson, otherwise he would, no doubt, have made good use of it.

These are my links for June 4th through June 5th:

• Google Chrome for Mac and Linux has Arrived: But Don’t Download it Yet – Google has just announced the first official beta versions of Google Chrome, its browser, for Mac and Linux. As of now, these versions are only available in the developer channel, which is Google's cutting edge, rapid-release channel for Google Chrome that is geared towards developers and testers, but not the mainstream public.
• template size Twitter background guidelines – Croncast – Ever wanted to make an interesting Twitter background? Here's how I did it.
• WordPress hack: Display your tags in a dropdown menu – I never liked tag clouds, for the simple reason that most of the time, they’re aren’t readable properly. Here is the solution to this problem: Displaying tags in a dropdown menu.
• Chart.ly – share stock charts on twitter
• Google Integration Toolkit • Projekty • Poradnik Webmastera – Google provides a lot of useful services, which can be integrated with your blog. With them you can check how your site is indexed in Google (using Google Webmaster Tools), get detailed statistics (Google Analytics), earn money (Google AdSense) and more. Most of them can be integrated using Text Widget only or modifying theme. This can cause problems, especially for beginners. Moreover, you have to remember to make all changes again when you decide to switch to new theme. You can avoid all of these problems by using Google Integration Toolkit plugin.
• How to Change the World: 24 Hours at Sea on the USS Nimitz – On Friday, May 29, 2009, fourteen bloggers and “distinguished visitors” served a twenty-four hour tour of duty on the USS Nimitz. The following 140 or so pictures and videos document this visit
• Snagsta | Your favourite things. Sorted. – Make lists of your favourite things. Share them with your friends. Discover new stuff in the lists of people similar to you.
• Top 50 UK Charity People by Twitter Followers | Snagsta – This is a list of Third Sector people I've found to be really passionate, knowledgeable and generous on Twitter. It's only a start, as I know there are lots of other great people out there, but I tried to limit the list by having individual (not organisation) profiles. I hope you enjoy following their tweets.
• Can Webwise Discover save Phorm? News – PC Advisor – Controversial behavioural advertising firm Phorm has announced a new system called Webwise Discover, a tool that can be used to recommend deep site content to web visitors based on tracking previous internet use.
• 9 Crucial UI Features of Social Media and Networking Sites | How-To | Smashing Magazine – This article goes over crucial features of the user interfaces of social media and social networking sites. It discusses important features, techniques and concepts behind these designs and explains why they are important, with examples from top sites. These easy and general usability strategies can be applied almost anywhere and to almost any type of user interface.
• BBC NEWS | World | Aerial guide to the D-Day beaches – BBC correspondent Robert Hall gives an aerial guided tour of the French coastline where the D-Day landings took place 65 years ago

These are my bookmarks for June 4th from 09:23 to 13:11:

• Can Webwise Discover save Phorm? News – PC Advisor – Controversial behavioural advertising firm Phorm has announced a new system called Webwise Discover, a tool that can be used to recommend deep site content to web visitors based on tracking previous internet use.
• 9 Crucial UI Features of Social Media and Networking Sites | How-To | Smashing Magazine – This article goes over crucial features of the user interfaces of social media and social networking sites. It discusses important features, techniques and concepts behind these designs and explains why they are important, with examples from top sites. These easy and general usability strategies can be applied almost anywhere and to almost any type of user interface.
• BBC NEWS | World | Aerial guide to the D-Day beaches – BBC correspondent Robert Hall gives an aerial guided tour of the French coastline where the D-Day landings took place 65 years ago
• Shut The Hell Up You Self-Promoting Turd | chrisbrogan.com – A great article on the power of brands and bonds

These are my links for June 2nd through June 3rd:

• How to: hide portions of text to Google on your WordPress blog – Hiding a portion of text to Google is damn easy, but not everyone is aware of this method. Simply use the following html comments in your source files (or in WordPress editor, in html mode) to hide a specific sentence or text to Google robots.
• WordPress › Lock Out « WordPress Plugins – This plugin will allow you to put your website into Lock Out mode to prevent access while you preform upgrades or maintenance on your site. Includes the ability to upload a pre-made html file for use as a placeholder page while in lock out mode or build your own online. The login page is still accessible and will allow only the user role you set to view the site normally while in lock out mode.
• 13 Beautifully Designed Mac and iPhone App Websites | Web Design Ledger – The Apple brand is synonymous with good design. It also seems that a lot of applications made for Macs and the iPhone seem to possess a little something extra when it comes to aesthetics. The designers of these apps do a great job in carrying over that same high level of quality in branding. This is evident in the applications themselves as well as their websites. Most of these sites all share certain qualities such as excellent use of color, big highly detailed icons, and pixel perfect buttons.
• Google AJAX Feed API – Dynamic Feed Control Wizard – Embed a Dynamic Feed Control on your web page and let your users see customized views of the feeds. Customize how the dynamic feed control should be displayed, and this wizard will write the code for you.
• Turn iPhone Photos into Postcards – No Stamps Required! – Are you an iPhone-equipped world traveler? If so, then you're going to love Postino, the latest app from AnguriaLab. This mobile application lets you take iPhone photos and turn them into postcards which you can send to your family and friends. And no, they don't mean "e-cards" (although Postino supports those, too) – they mean actual, printed out, physical cards send through the good ol' fashioned snail mail service.
• Micro Persuasion: What is the Future of Twitter? Only You Know – Yesterday during my keynote on the future of Twitter at the TWTRCON conference in San Francisco I decided to do something different. For one day, at least, I put away PowerPoint and fired up a mind mapping program (in my case I use Mind Node for the Mac).
• Blogsalot – Now, look. I want to talk about John Mayer. Not because I'm recently obsessed with him. Not because his song Waiting For The World To Change is one of the best things I've heard in ages (despite being released three years ago) or because he's way better looking than I am (bastard). No. I want to talk about John Mayer's approach to releasing an album in a marketing context.

These are my bookmarks for June 2nd from 13:54 to 14:56:

• Google AJAX Feed API – Dynamic Feed Control Wizard – Embed a Dynamic Feed Control on your web page and let your users see customized views of the feeds. Customize how the dynamic feed control should be displayed, and this wizard will write the code for you.
• Turn iPhone Photos into Postcards – No Stamps Required! – Are you an iPhone-equipped world traveler? If so, then you're going to love Postino, the latest app from AnguriaLab. This mobile application lets you take iPhone photos and turn them into postcards which you can send to your family and friends. And no, they don't mean "e-cards" (although Postino supports those, too) – they mean actual, printed out, physical cards send through the good ol' fashioned snail mail service.
• Micro Persuasion: What is the Future of Twitter? Only You Know – Yesterday during my keynote on the future of Twitter at the TWTRCON conference in San Francisco I decided to do something different. For one day, at least, I put away PowerPoint and fired up a mind mapping program (in my case I use Mind Node for the Mac).
• Blogsalot – Now, look. I want to talk about John Mayer. Not because I'm recently obsessed with him. Not because his song Waiting For The World To Change is one of the best things I've heard in ages (despite being released three years ago) or because he's way better looking than I am (bastard). No. I want to talk about John Mayer's approach to releasing an album in a marketing context.
• Alexandra Roumbas Goldstein – I’m a writer, editor and social media / online communities somethingorother for a leading UK animal charity. I’m also happy to write for others, so please do email me if you’d like a chunk of my keyboard time.

These are my links for June 1st through June 2nd:

• 37 Data-ish Blogs You Should Know About | FlowingData – You might not know it, but there are actually a ton of data and visualization blogs out there. I'm a bit of a feed addict subscribing to just about anything with a chart or a mention of statistics on it (and naturally have to do some feed-cleaning every now and then). In a follow up to my short list last year, here are the data-ish blogs, some old and some new, that continue to post interesting stuff.
• Wesabe > Your Money. Your Community. – We want to help you get rid of credit card debt and start saving for college for your kids. We are tired of getting stung by stupid fees from banks and credit cards. We believe pooling information on where we all spend can help you make better financial decisions and ultimately take control of your money to reach financial goals.
• Google Local Lures Small Businesses With Their Own Web Dashboard – Google wants more small businesses to claim their listing profiles on Google Local (which is basically listings that pop up in Google Maps and local search results). To entice them, starting tomorrow it will give local businesses in the real world with physical addresses a free dashboard akin to what Websites get for free with Google Analytics (see screenshot above). Except that it will show stats such as how many times their business comes up as a search result, how often people click through, as well as how many times people generate driving directions to their business son Google Maps and where those people come from.
• Show Pages – Backstory – CNN.com – We show you the story behind the story, revealing a side of news that is rarely seen. To accomplish this, we capture the passion and emotion of witness accounts. We hear how correspondents deal with the challenges and human emotions they confront. And we showcase the worldwide reach and resources of CNN
• Mobile Internet makes its way into cars – Auto Tech- msnbc.com – Just as radios evolved from hulking home consoles into expected accessories in virtually all cars, so may Wi-Fi Internet access break free to become a commonplace automotive feature. That’s the hope of Autonet Mobile, a company that supplies in-car Wi-Fi routers that let passengers use laptops and other mobile devices in their vehicles.
• Build Unlimited Affiliate Datafeed eCommerce Stores | datafeedr.com – In just minutes from now, you're going to learn about Datafeedr, a powerful push-button store creation system that makes it fast and easy for affiliate marketers just like you to set up, manage and update a complete affiliate store WITHOUT touching any clunky datafeed files, learning a programming language or hiring a programmer.
• Warmer, Fuzzier – The Refreshed Logo – NYTimes.com – A great article on the new refined logos which are represented a warmer, 'fuzzier' feeling for their brand.
• 60+ Amazing Poster and Advertisment Tutorials | Tutorials | Smashing Magazine – In this article, we have collected a mixture of Photoshop and Illustrator tutorials related to posters and advertisements. You will find some are intermediate and some are very advanced, but they’ll all give you a lot of direction with photo composition, illustration, coloring processing, typography techniques, pen tool tricks, shapes processing and much more.
• A Collection Of Resources For Motion Graphics Addicts | Spyre Studios – I have always loved motion graphics and animation and I’m sure many of you web and graphic designers do too (if not, don’t worry, it’ll grow on you!) So, I thought I’d make a list of resources, sites and blogs on the topic since it’s something I really enjoy, I hope you find it useful!

These are my links for May 26th through May 28th:

• The Forrester Blog For Interactive Marketing Professionals – Microsoft announced today its Bing search engine, a "decision engine" that will replace live.com worldwide as of June 3. A distant third place in the search engine game, Microsoft hopes that this engine will help it gain more searcher share by delivering results and content more relevant to how users actually search. What makes Bing different from existing search engines?
• Micropayments for content and services | Contenture – Every time a Contenture user visits your web site, you make money. Your slice of every visitor's monthly payment is based on how many visits they made to your site divided by the total number of visits they made to all Contenture sites.
• Mozilla Labs Jetpack | Exploring new ways to extend and personalize the Web – Jetpack is a newly formed experiment in using open Web technologies to enhance the browser, with the goal of allowing anyone who can build a Web site to participate in making the Web a better place to work, communicate and play
• Linkbait Writing Services | Unique linkbait writing services to help your website grow and get more traffic. – At Linkbait Writing Services, we are determined to bring your website or blog more traffic by creating quality linkbait articles. Our small team of writers strive to create linkbait articles that will not only help you reach the front page of social bookmarking sites like Digg and Stumble Upon, but also bring you traffic for the lifetime of your blog. Save your time for marketing your blog and interaction with your readers and let us take care of the time consuming task of building linkbait articles.
• WordPress Designers – Premium WordPress Themes – WordPress Designers is a small team of talented developers and creative designers. We pride ourselves on our intimate knowledge or WordPress and our ability to push it to its limits. Since discovering the WordPress platform several years ago, we have strived to learn as much as we could about it so that we could bring you some of the most creative and well coded themes on the market.
• Outlaw Design Blog » 34 Brilliant Ads on Semi Trucks – a great post showing loads of advertising designs on lorries
• ConceptShare: – ConceptShare is a simple, cost-effective tool for gathering feedback from team members and clients.
• 5 Basic Rules for Creating an Effective About Page — Des Walsh dot Com – This short list of basic rules for creating an effective About page has been prompted by my frustration with the number of blogs and other websites that either do not have an About page or, more commonly in my experience, do not put their About page to work effectively in the interests of their business.
• Small Screen Blog: All about mobile – (by MoFuse) – If you believe that mobile is a strong medium to reach your customers – you need to be thinking about how your brand will evolve on the mobile web. Today you have a few interesting options and they are not mutually exclusive.
  As consumers wake up to the idea that they can actually reach the internet on their phone, we are about to see an explosion of new mobile devices; ITouch, Kindle, “netbooks” and even Sony Playstation Portable already are rapidly changing the ‘connection’ landscape.
• D u s t y T u n e s | Let your music collection see the light…. – Dusty Tunes automatically creates your own personal web page with a list of all the music in your iTunes library (although you can cheat). It will organise it all into a nice list and provide you with links so you can share it with your friends, on blogs, forums, websites, digg, facebook or simply keep it as a personal reference. You can come back at any time and update your page with all your latest tracks.
• WordPress › SEO Ultimate « WordPress Plugins – SEO Ultimate was developed with WordPress plugin "best practices" in mind:

  * Integration with WordPress's contextual help system
  * Internationalization support
  * Nonce security
  * An uninstall routine
  * Integration with the new WordPress 2.7 menu

• Privacy Policy Plugin For WordPress – At the end of February, 2008, Google started requiring AdSense publishers to display a privacy policy on all sites that displayed AdSense ads or search boxes. Since many WordPress blogs are monetized with AdSense, I decided to write a plugin that would automate the creation of AdSense-compliant privacy policies for WordPress users. Thus the Privacy Policy Plugin for WordPress was born.
• WordPress › CMS Navigation « WordPress Plugins – Do you want to use WordPress to create a full website, with easy navigation and menus? This plugin will let you add essential navigation functions to your template.
• WordPress › WordPress Navigation List Plugin NAVT « WordPress Plugins – The WordPress Navigation Tool (NAVT) plugin is a powerful tool designed to provide you with complete control over the creation, styling and contents of your web site's navigation.
• Why Twitter beats RSS: Context + Content = Added Value – broadstuff – Twitter

Why is it than when I lack inspiration for writing (like today) I go surfing around for new template styles? There is never any shortage of templates out there which can be tailored and I am really seeing the value in paying for the professional themes like ithemes which I love (this design is based on the Flexx theme).

I spend a lot of time admiring other blogs, thinking ‘why can’t mine look as good as that‘ but if I spend too much time on the design there will be no time for the content. Like a good sandwich, it needs both bread and jam. So maybe I can pull this post into something useful by talking about design inspiration. If you don’t know me, I have a great desire and admiration for great creative/beautiful work but don’t have the ability to actually design myself. So like a kid at  the sweet shop window I have started hanging around some great sites for design inspiration. Here are my top 5 places, I would welcome other suggestions if you have them.

1. Blog Spoongraphics

This site is regularly updated with some awesome inspirational designs and loads of freebies. The blog is the ‘digital playground’ of Chris Spooner, a freelance designer from Sheffield.

2. My Ink Blog

Another site that is chock full of design inspirations. Often showcasing the latest design trends for websites and blogs, it is never short of jaw droppingly beautiful design examples.  The site also offers links to freebies and tutorials to help you achieve similar results (although not in my case!)

3. Line 25

Like the first two, another excellent blog that covers design trends and tutorials. (can you spot a trend here?) This is the second blog from Chris Spooner, of Blog.spoongraphics – very impressive!

4. ithemes – WordPress Templates

iThemes work hard to continue delivering new and great looking blog templates. I found their designs inspirational and very well put together, offering a wealth of customisation at the back end making the whole package really excellent.

These themes also come with the Billboard plug in which can also be bought as a standalone plug in. If you have seen many sites that have neat rows of social media icons and wondered how to achieve that, well you can do it with the Billboard plug in. It is also used on many sites for the ad panels you see (like on www.thenextweb.com). The billboard plug in allows you to create containers in which you can add images, defining size and other details before wrapping them up into a widget for site placement. You watch a video of how it works here.

5.  The Next Web

Whilst not strictly a design site, I have always loved their content and find the layout of the blog brilliant, and constantly evolving. A combination of great design, awesome plug ins (things like the Greetbox I found on TheNextWeb) make it probably my fave site out there at the moment.

So that’s just some of the sites I keep up with. I am always looking for new sites, new inspiration – what or who do you think I should be reading?

These are my bookmarks for May 12th from 13:28 to 16:43:

• Byte Night 2009 – Each year, over 500 people from the IT and business community give up their bed for one night to experience a little of what it might be like to be homeless. The money they raise helps Action for Children tackle the root causes of youth homelessness and gets thousands of children and young people off the streets and into secure accommodation with education and training opportunities.
• UserVoice – Customer Feedback 2.0 – Harness the ideas of your customers. Build great products. Turn customers into champions. – Cool tool for monitoring user feedback on your site
• Virtualisation & Dedicated Virtual Servers – Mesmet is a UK company based in Guilford offering reasonably priced hosting
• Linking to bad neighborhoods can KILL your SEO efforts – Search and Internet Marketing rants, news and views – the Fire Horse Trail – A great article outlining how you can find out who your neighbours are and how that may affect your SEO.
• ThisNext – Recommend, Share and Discover Great Products! – Looks like a place you can shop for inspiration and generally be part of a community.
• Brochure Templates, PDF Templates, Indesign Templates, Graphic Designs – BrochureReady – magazine design templates
• YippieMove – Email transfers made easy – Whether you want to change email providers or you just want to make archive copies, YippieMove can help. We’ll transfer your email between whichever email providers you choose.