hmmm, so i’ve been way busy but wanted to try to get back to blogging at least once a week (!)…maybe…thought that since folks are always emailing with requests for tools and resources, it might make sense to throw out a bunch of quick round-ups for readers…with that in mind, here’s another batch of things to play around with, along with ratings from ‘useful’ to ‘pretty much bullshit’ (yes, i’m a huge fan of hard science and reason)

ibegin source - unfuckingbelievable, one step closer to a free hoovers!!!
useful? no words to describe it…
http://source.ibegin.com/ - please just go look at this and tell me this is not the first step toward the ultimate open source hoovers, wiki style…they’ve got business data for all, and it is FREE for personal use, and they have (for commercial) map elements, phone etc….now just add a layer that is not ‘yelp’ and instead real business insight and voila - a free version of dun and bradstreet meets hoovers…just cull the web sites, autofill the execs and all of that…please, please, please ibegin, please work more on this…

zudos - monitor what people are saying all over the interwebs
useful? yes
http://zudos.com/ - very nice little tool, considering that people used to actually pay serious cash for this kind of service

google image ripper - just the images, no bullshit
useful? compared to froogle.com, sure, but very niche application…
http://dearcomputer.nl/gir/ - self explanatory, skips the bullshit, gives you pages of images (very useful if you need to extract and archive product images for a large project, or if you’re mark cuban back when he used to collect porn)

delexa - rank domains by tags and keywords
useful? convenient, but so is pissing by the side of the road
http://www.delexa.org/ - this is really a bit of a mashup pulling data from multiple other sites, but quite useful to investigate, for example, possible channel ad focus for select keywords and categories (as in, does yahoo panama really stack up, or was it just a bunch of colorful ads stuffed with echo chamber praise?)

popurio.us - check out a site’s popularity
useful? convenient and clean, but so is an air-dryer instead of paper towel, and sometimes you want the towel
http://popuri.us/ - useful if you’re looking for another one-stop resource to measure a site’s rank when doing evaluation of all sorts of startups…

profilelinker - follow all social networks from one place
useful? just like that service that facebook offered, you know, the one that pissed everybody off?
http://profilelinker.com/ - okay, so you’re supposed to be using this to follow friends - but why not any source? doh. thanks for the free people tracking service guys!

trulia - another way to find out how much some source’s home is worth
useful? as one writer put it (for zillow), “yuppy porn”
http://www.trulia.com/ - like zillow, but with some interesting variations on data sources accessible through advanced search (school district elements, property types, etc - quite useful for very focused regional research and data sampling…

phonemyphone - validate phone lines or perhaps just annoy the shit out of people
useful? yeah, if you’re 12, or if you’re an insane ex-lover, mark cuban, or just feel like playing games with people
http://phonemyphone.com/ - this one will raise hell, since it allows for awful crank calling potential…original idea was to call your own lost phone (under the sofa? oh, ever see that curbed episode where the phone is in her, uh…vj?) - but you might find a valid use, right? okay, so right now: everybody go and register and then let’s all pick one big company like (elgoog?) and coordinate with twitter (doh…)

make steve jobs happy, free your itunes tracks from apple’s DRM!
useful? abso-fucking-lutely (take that itunes collection on over to your zune dudes and dudettes)
http://seidai.50webs.com/ - mac only - this uses the imovie conversion process to strip all drm elements from your itunes tracks without having to waste time burning and then dropping in again (okay, so it’s not a research tool at all, whatever, enjoy it while it’s still around)

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