Every once in a while, I realize that I’ve got a compendium of sites that I look at daily, sometimes to find topics for BuzzNetworker, sometimes just to learn things, but that I don’t always share with you guys. So today, to give you something to read for the weekend while I’m up in Whistler for Word Camp, I’m going to give you a few of my favourite sites.

In no particular order, here’s five of my regulars.

WebWare - Cool Web Apps for Everyone - One of the reasons that I really like this site is because it’s comprehensive coverage of some cool tricks to either speed up your surfing, tweak your experience etc.

Muhammad Saleem - Dude has a brilliant mind. Some of the things that he comes up with are simply awesome, and anyone who wants to learn about social media from one of the stars of the game, go check out Mu writes.

Eyecube - Rick provides thoughtful content, and talks about seriously interesting things. What more do you want?

Dan Zarella - A master of metrics. If you’re looking for anything related to social media metrics at all, Dan’s your guy, and I love him. He’s a social & viral marketing scientist… and that’s really quite brilliant I think.

Chris Brogan - No list of social media sites would be complete without Chris. Such a nice guy and so smart! Chris takes his time to explain things and provides thoughtful content, interesting insights and food for thought.

These are just a few of the sites I follow … What are some of your “must-reads?

[image sources: Muhammad Saleem by CC: TopRankOnlineMarketing and Chris Brogan by CC: Phil Campbell]

Tags: Blogs, Reading list, recommendations, social media blogs

I might have spoken too soon when it comes to the things I don’t like about Chrome. Now, admittedly, there aren’t many, but I also didn‘t know they were releasing as many as 10 new builds a night. The updates are coming fast and furious, but they haven’t taken the extra step of having a way for chrome users to get regular notices that there’s a new build.

Dirhael, a DonationCoder user, has taken the initiative to release a portable checker for Chrome nightly builds. This makes me ridiculously happy – I generally have too much going on on a regular basis to be bothered checking for updates all the time. I’d much rather have some enterprising, smart young man build something that will just do all this for me.

Facebook launches an instant messaging service- Will this keep you on their site longer?

Building  Twitter Following- Interesting reactions from different twitter users.

Using Social Media to Grow A Blog’s Readership- An excellent post from ProBlogger

AOL acquires Bebo.com for $850 Million- In case you haven’t heard

I will have a post up later about my day listening to Media Work author Mark Deuze guest lecture here at UB.

Here are some interesting links that I came across browsing my feeds this morning:

Fast Company has launched a social network, this is something we are going to see more and more of in the next year with companies building brand specific social networking sites.

Want to know how to block Facebook applications? This video will show you how.

Yahoo’s oneConnect has been examined by TechCrunch. Want to combine your mobile friends with your social networking friends in one mobile application?

An overview of social networks

DataPortability the good and the bad 

Here are some of the stories coming across my feed reader this morning:

Work, Connected By Social Networking (From the Denver Post)

Yahoo is considering a merger with AOL

Employer Branding in Social Media

While I like to think that I have applied social networking on multiple promotional levels there are always people out there using it a little different than I have in a professional or personal level.

Today I found an article about why non-profits should use social networking and how they should go about it.  I think posts like this reinforce the different ways people can use social networking and open up different ways we can use these sites.

Google Struggles to Monetize Social Networking Inventory- Are MySpace and Orkut slowing the growth of the company?

What will the impact of potential Microsoft/Yahoo merger be on social networking- Neither have been able to get it right, with pooled resources do they have a chance?

Google shows off their social graph API

 Making Social Networking Pay for Users

MySpace’s COO Leads New Initiatives

Facebook Request Fatigue? Ignore them all  

Yahoo’s OpenID Services Launches Public Beta 

BlogCatalog Gets More Social With SezWho Integration  

You can sign up for it here.

Here is the coverage over at TechCrunch

Here is the coverage over at Mashable

The program will be compatible with Google’s Open Social Platform with a few tweaks.

The age old question is asked again: How much social networking can we do?

Mahalo takes a step to social networking profile aggregation (I will probably review it sometime next week)

 Is MySpace about to give external link warnings?