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!

Yesterday I was viewing my Twitter feed and catching up on any Tweets I had missed when I came across a few people mentioning a new service named Plurk. Thinking it was another social media aggregator, I scrolled on to read the rest of my feeds.

But then my curiosity got the better of me. Clicking into the search bar at the top of my browser, thinking that I was about to discover and online version of the board game “Kerplunk”, I typed in the name and swiftly hit enter.

Firstly Plurk’s meta-description of their site is as follows:

Plurk is a social journal that let’s you publish, share your thoughts, emo-ness, “!%#%”#” and loves. What is up, my friend? See what other people are doing …

OK, so it’s a social platform that can take the piss out of itself, I like that. Looking at the front page, it sells itself as a very similar service to Twitter, one that boasts a few extra features and a much nicer user interface. It also has a logo which is a Headless Dog…..The screenshot below demonstrates the layout:

Having befriended a few friends from Twitter on Plurk, I set to work trying out the service. First impressions are that the timeline is a very good idea, it shows you who posted and when and allows you to be able to reply to their message with a click to open a dropdown reply form (shown again below):

Word on the internet is that Plurk don’t want user’s developing third party applications for this service, although I have seen no official word on this. Twitter’s real plus is that it allows you to post and receive via SMS, browser, addon or client. So far only Gtalk is supported by Plurk.

There is however a clever sidebar addition for Firefox which utilises the mobile version of the site. You can download this addon by clicking here.

Have I sold Plurk and you think you want to try it? Sign up via this link and you will automatically be added to my friends list.

Everybody remembers the last time they experienced some truly awesome customer service, whether it be in your local supermarket, dining in a restaurant or when a popular website rolls out one of your suggestions.

The latter is what Mixx did.

Mixx has a fantastic reputation for delivering on user requests as I have posted before but let me show you how a request I put to the Mixx team was rolled out in a matter of days.

The Story (sit down children).

I had requested that Mixx place a “Google” category in the Tech section of their website (as shown below) via Twitter. I didn’t receive a response right away but assumed it would be added to the list of site improvements.

Fast forward four days and I receive a Twitter message notification in my email telling me a Google category has been added.

I log in and low and behold, the section is there in all it’s glory!

It really shows that when users come up with a good idea, the Mixx team will do whatever it takes to get the feature implemented. With all the problems at Digg, I really can’t see people putting up with inadequacy there for too long before they end up coming to the “Red Side” where there is a proper community.

You can view the new category here.

Stumbleupon was one of the first social sites that I used, it’s been around so long, most people couldn’t have told you it was classed as a social site until the Web2.0/Myspace/Facebook era came into effect.

Stumbleupon started off as a way to “stumble upon” fun and interesting websites submitted by it’s users. As the years have passed and the social aspect of media has come to the fore, users have been able to recommend links to each other, communicate via the site and of course has attracted a lot of self marketers.

I won’t lie to you, I submitted a few of my most popular articles to see if it would bring in a new user base who wanted to read my content, it was shameless self promotion. Did it work? Yes.

I have submitted the same sites to Digg and to Mixx, these sites heavily relying on people to find my article, take the time to read it and then decide whether it was worth a vote. These sites had driven no more than 30 unique hits to my website.

Below is a report from the last month from my Google Analytics:

To put this in perspective, I only submitted links to Stumbleupon this week. The 28 hits from Mixx are based on three submissions over a monthly period. The sheer number of people that have “stumbled” on this site have produced the one comment and a rise in 4 RSS subscribers, I can only say thankyou to the people who found my content interesting.

I will not submit every blog post on this site, I have only submitted a few pages that would genuinely interest a viewer. Stumbleupon to me is a fair and useful way of finding content, it brings back the element of chance that people can find my submissions and vote on them from their toolbar. I will continue to promote Mixx as I would rather promote good content than my own, but Stumbeupon does bring interesting sites to you….fast.