The folks over at Text-Link-Ads today released a new tool today:

What exactly does the Blog Juice tool do? I was confused too. From the blog post that announced it:

It's a fun tool that allows you to compare your blog to other's based on: rss subscribers, Alexa, and Technorati rank and links.

My person blog got a respectable 5.5, a far cry from gizmodo's 9.8, but better than nothing I suppose.

This is a funny little tool. Take a visit to Googlism to find out what Google thinks about you. Unfortunately, Google didn't know me but it had a pretty good result for Darth Vader:

darth vader is my friend
darth vader is on the north
darth vader is one of the numerous carved grotesques on the cathedral
darth vader is the original evil villain stereotype
darth vader is forced to employ bounty hunters to track down han solo
darth vader is a fictional character in the star wars universe
darth vader is clearly a type of antichrist
darth vader is the epitome of evil
darth vader is unclear
darth vader is evil throughout
darth vader is my friend anti
darth vader is currently having a movie made entirely about his life
darth vader is back mark lewis
darth vader is a tangibly evil symbol of emperor palpatine's doctrine
darth vader is an overwriting

Via Digg I've found a new ego tool, socialmeter. From the web site:

Social meter scans the major social websites to analyze a webpage's social popularity. Currently we scan Del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Google, Jots, Linkroll, Netscape, Reddit, Shadows, Spurl, Technorati, and Yahoo My Web.

This is a rather simple tool, but it did lead to an interesting discovery. I found that my blog was actually on digg (or at least submitted to it) about a month and a half ago.

I've blogged about ego searching before, most recently in my Ego 101 article. SiteProNews has a good article that discusses this a bit more in depth:

Ego Searches and RSS

What is interesting about this article is that it focuses on getting the ego results into RSS. This can be pretty useful. For example, you could create a whole portal about you based on those RSS feeds, and lets face it, who wouldn't want a portal about themselves? (I may need to set one up as a test to share with folks later in the week.)

Thanks to Yahoo News I've turned up a neat little tool:

MyHeritage Face Recognition

The concept is simple. Load up a picture of yourself and it will tell you what celebrities you most resemble. So, who did I most resemble? Click here to find out. And yes, I'm as surprised as you are.

So, technically I'm cheating. I'm borrowing a blog entry I wrote over at my main blog, but until the Blog Police hunt me down, I'm going to get over it.

A cool little service from Italy allows you to make your magazine covers, and the results are pretty good. You can add yourself to a newspaper, Playboy, Time (as shown here), Playgirl (I tried, but the program crashed), and Rolling Stone.

You want to make sure you have an image ready beforehand (duh), and you also want to crop out as much as possible to fit within the space allowed. When I first blogged about this I thought the copyright folks would be all over this, but apparently they aren't smart enough to find Italy.

I had to read this article when I saw the title crawl across my Google Sidebar:

Blogging Is All About Me

According to this article, which references a Pew study, most bloggers like to blog about themselves. Rumour has it the study took nine years and five billion dollars to complete. From the study:

"The survey showed that only a minority of bloggers is interested in topics other than themselves."

Shocked! Shocked I say! I never would have guessed that.

It occurs to me that a few of you may be lacking in the ever-so-important Ego Management skills. While I've reviewed a few "power tools" I know that not everyone may recognize some of the more simplest forms of ego management. It is also possible you may forget the URL to your favorite tool (of course, how could you forget egoaddict.com??), so here is one simple tip for those who are on their baby steps to Ego Addiction. (We need a 12 step program to get into Ego Addiction I think.)

So the first tip is very obvious. Just google your name. I think people tend to forget that they can use Google for something other then the NFL, Lost, or celebrity searches. Just type your name in. You want to ensure that Google considers your whole name, so include it in quotes:

"Raymond Camden"

Google is pretty smart so you won't see a big difference if you try it without:

Raymond Camden

Of course, to be complete(ly anal), you can simply search for both:

Raymond Camden OR "Raymond Camden"

I'll have another Google tip tomorrow.

I truly didn't mean to forget about this blog. Can I blame the new job? Can I blame summer's heat slowly sucking the creativity out of my brain? Perhaps I can blame Oblivion, the crack of RPGs. Either way, I'm back, and will adhere to at least a weekly schedule. I've got a few glimmerings of ideas to help make it easier for me to dig up some interesting content. So - if I haven't lost you already, I hope you stick with me.

Ok, I have to admit. I still don't believe this is a real service. I don't know why, but it seems so.... crazy that I just can't believe it's real. What is blogsitter? From their home page:

Are you a blogger? Do you face some no-internet-days, holidays or something else that keeps you from updating your precious blog? And you know that a blog without daily updates dies very fast? Don't worry any longer! blogsitter.net is the plattform for bloggers who need caring people to sit their blogs. Register and place your advertisment to search for a fitting blogsitter. Someone who has your skills in the field of your blog, someone who is trustful and eager to care about your blog.

Are people really so addicted to blogging that they can't go a day w/o a blog entry? I agree that it is a good idea to keep content fresh (although I'm not doing that here quite well), but come on! Any decent blog package should allow you to release entries in the future. I'd much rather write entries for later than trust anyone I didn't know well on my blog.

Is there anyone out there actually using this service? Or would even consider it? Thanks to the Zoid-ster for pointing this site out to me. As a reminder, folks can always send me suggestions for sites to review.