I consider myself to be “involved” with the social media scene and look to make my internet experience simple but effective. I belong to many social sites which allow me to get the latest news or even share some of my own.

I run a self hosted Wordpress blog and use a few plugins to help keep my blog involved with social media as possible. Today I want to share with you a few simple suggestions that you may be able to use on your blog.

1. FriendFeed Activity Widget

The FriendFeed Activity Widget allows you to share your progress through your favourite social websites. If you don’t have a FriendFeed account, simply head over to their website, tie in all your blog, mirco-blogging, photo, video website credentials and alert your website readers to what you have been getting upto. You can see this widget in action on the sidebar of this blog.

2. Social Homes

Social Homes is a nifty little plugin that you could say runs along side the FriendFeed plugin. By entering your usernames on certain social sites, you can have a little widget full of relevant links to your other homes on the web. Again, look to the right and you will see this plugin in action.

Please note: I have added a few extra sites to this plugin, if you wish to use the version I edited, please contact me and I will email you the updated version. I have submitted this to the author and it’s a matter of where it will be used or not.

3. Twitter Tools

If you are a Twitter user, this plugin allows you to send and display tweets on/from your Wordpress blog. By adding your login info to the admin page, you can specify whether your blog alerts your Twitter feed every time you publish a new blog post.

I have disabled the sidebar display as my FriendFeed widget will only duplicate the Twitter information.

4. WP Greet Box

WP Greet Box is primarily aimed at blog owners who submit their content to social news sites. When a visitor lands on one of your pages, this plugin will allow you to tailor a greeting from where that particular user has come from. For instance, if your site was Dugg, this plugin would welcome visitors from Digg, asking them to Digg your site while they’re visiting. It also recognises Google, Delicious, Stumbleupon, Technorati and Twitter.

5. Sociable

This useful little plugin again targets the social news submitters out there. By activating this plugin, you can specify a range of sites that your visitors can submit your posts to. Instead of submitting all your own content, why not let a the people who read your site decide?

Here are a few suggestions to aid you in your quest for internet domination, if you know of anymore, please suggest them in the comments.

You may have noticed over the past few days, I have been adding a few different buttons to the blog so you can interact with me around the web, not just on this blog. If you haven’t noticed, by all means cast your eyes right to the ten social media icons that will point you to some of my various social website hangouts.

I have also decided to head back to FriendFeed and synchronise all my information into one centralised feed. I have ported this information over to the sidebar of my blog using the very useful FriendFeed Activity Widget created by a talented designer by the name of Evan Sims. This plugin will collate activity and let you know what I have been interested in lately (yes, it could be considered stalkerish!).

If you are like me and a purveyor of social media websites, add me on Twitter, Friendfeed or even subscribe to the RSS feed to regular updates, it’s so easy your mother could do it!

I have been reading Techcrunch and various Web2.0 blogs recently bemoaning the fact that Twitter has been down so much since it’s popularity sky-rocketed. You have Michael Arrington single-handedly charting their ups and downs, telling us how Twitter can change their ways to maximise their cluster computing from Amazon.

The problem is that people are building this service up on a pedestal, making its very existence essential for them to live their lives.

I happen to have Twitter, Gmail, MSN, Yahoo and my blog as other communication mediums. When certain services are down (there have been times I am unable to connect to Gtalk and I bet they have better server management than Twitter), I have just switched to another service.

I’m stuck for things to do this Sunday afternoon and have been bombarded on Twitter and Google Reader with anti-Twitter propaganda and wanted to sound off.

Just for the record, Friendfeed is a useless service and I have no idea why people are singing its praises so much.