If you are a Tag Cloud fan then Wordle is your Nirvana. Paste in a block of text, Blog URL, or a del.icio.us user name and the service will create a random word cloud based on the contents. You can change the look and feel yourself or just hit random to have Wordle determine the look and feel for you. Once you find the tag cloud that suits your personality, print it, save it, or share it in their public gallery.

Feedly has made reading my RSS feeds more enjoyable. If you are a Google Reader and Firefox user, this Firefox extension converts your RSS reader into an online magazine. Not only does it include a slick interface but it also makes scanning through the mountain of information you receive easier by allowing you to group and view your content how you want to see it. Getting to the stuff you want to read and clearing out the stuff you want to ignore makes living in this content driven world just a bit easier to manage.

The Richard Solo was one of the first iPhone battery backups on the market. At around $60, this little gadget was a no brainer for me. Before I go to sleep at night I simply plug my battery backup into my iPhone and then plug the battery into the wall adapter. When I wake up in the morning I have a fully charged iPhone and a fully charged back up. If I am on the go and start running out of juice, I just plug in my Richard Solo and continue using my iPhone without skipping a beat. It is great for the those long coast to coast flights.

Follow me long enough on Twitter and you will know that I am a supporter of the Hype Machine. Anthony, the founder of the machine, has built a site that has gone beyond being just a MP3 blog aggregator and has morphed into a engine of music exploration. Follow your favorite MP3 blogs, listen to new music as it is released, and find new artists that you would never have known existed. The Hype Machine’s set of tools make it easier and fun to do all of these things. Check out the 2008 Zeitgeist for an introduction to the power of the Hype Machine.

If you own an Apple TV or Airport Express, you know how nice it is to listen to your iTunes music over your stereo. But what happens if you are on a website  (i.e. The Hype Machine, MySpace, Blip.fm) that has a built in flash music player and you want to listen to those tracks over your stereo? Airfoil comes to the rescue. This little $25 application, which is available for Mac and Windows, lets you stream any sound that your PC makes through your Apple TV and/or Airport Express. Go ahead and try it out. Everything sounds better through a real stereo system.

Enjoy.

The Jing Project allows you to take screen shots (png) or video captures (flash with audio) on your computer and quickly share them. I used Jing for all of the images you see in this post by simply going to each site, clicking on Jing’s little sunshine in the corner of my screen, selecting image capture, and then highlighting what I wanted to capture on the screen. It was 60 seconds of work and included the upload to Wordpress. What’s great is that it works just as well on Windows as it does on a Mac. They also have a pro version that allows you to export smaller video files (flash files can get big) and much more. Jing is a top 10 application for me. Oh yeah, did I mention it was free?

The folks over at IKEA Hacker take Ikea’s modular design to a new level and create really cool and functional mashups that anyone can replicate. As someone who used Ikea to renovate and furnish my first condo,  I can truly appreciate what the hackers do with this stuff. I wish Ikea and the hackers existed when I was in my 20’s. I would have had the phattest pad.

I Love Photos’ wants to make your digital photos more functional. Their first free product launch (for mac only) runs a face recognition process against your photos and allows you to assign each face it finds to a tag or set of tags via a nice drag and drop interface. When I tested it out, the product found my big head pretty easily. I tagged all of the photos that included my face in them as “Huge Noggin” and now all I have to do is click on that tag to see all of the pictures that contain me. I am interested to see how this product evolves over time. I wonder if they will start to identify landmarks and other non-facial targets as well. I am not a huge fan of having to use more than one application to manage one subject area (i.e. photos) but at least I Love Photos offers bi-directional syncing with iPhoto, my main photo management system.

I am always on the lookout for Wordpress plugins that can make my blog better. Meet Your Commenters plugin adds a new screen to your Dashboard and leverages Google Social Graph API to deliver enhanced information about the folks who comment on your site. It is a great way to learn more about your readers and find other social networks on which you can interact with them. As the Social Graph becomes more robust, I expect this plugin to become an even better way to get to know your peeps.

The other day  I was looking for an iPhone application that would let me stream Woxy.com internet radio over my iPhone. FStream for the iPhone is offically my favorite for iPhone internet radio streaming application. Based on the open source Mac version, this simple app allows you to add radio stations easily and quickly become a portable, streaming radio superstar. I can now get in my car, plug my iPhone into the auxiliary jack, open FStream, and flip between my internet radio stations like it was my car stereo. You can also use it as a voice recorder but until my online brain, Evernote, lets me down, I will probably never use that feature. FYI, some other internet radio stations I enjoy are Seattle’s juggernaut KEXP.org and LA’s NPR station KCRW.

Enjoy

Never find yourself looking for a toilet again. SitorSquat will tell you where the nearest clean bathroom is. They even have an iPhone app for those tech junkies who find themselves in a bind. Add toilets and you have a chance to win prizes. Great idea and it’s free!

Snocator is an iPhone app that allows you to get real time weather conditions, ski conditions, and leverages GPS and interactive maps to keep you from getting lost on the slopes. If you are like me and find yourself trying to find you way back to your lodge at 4pm as the lifts start closing, this little app could be the saving grace. $1.99 may be a bit steap but I like the idea.

Ken Rockwell is the man. If you are looking for information and honest reviews on photography gear Ken’s site is the place to start. The odds are you won’t need another source. I have been eying the Nikon 18-200mm VR lens for my D70s. Ken loves the lens and offers this review to prove it. His site is run via donations so please help Ken keep this resource going if you can.

People call Blip.fm the twitter of music sharing. I can see what they mean but I think it is much more. Blip.fm is the first service that allows people to create their own DJ persona on their own web-based radio station…easily. As the service becomes more mature (i.e. iPhone App, Streaming Stations per User, etc.) watch for it to take off. I look forward to the day when I can walk around with my head phones on and listen to my friend’s playlists as they add to them. Even better, how cool would be it be to create a playlist as you walk around. Blip.fm could be  a real-time soundtrack of your life. Priority #1 guys…iPhone app. That will change the game for me. Oh yeah…DJ akaRaff is where I lay my tracks.

OtherInbox has made my email functional again. My goal a few months ago was to take my inbox back and limit it to only human interactions. Otherinbox allowed me to do that. My friends are amazed at how quickly I reply to their emails now that they don’t get buried in my inbox in a matter of minutes. So what’s the deal? I could write all day and never show you what Tony Hall (@tonychall) from All About the Betas does in this video.  As you will see in the videio, it will change how you handle email forever. I even sign up for more newletters and such than I used to.

Enjoy.