If you’re like me (and 90% of other people out there) and you don’t have your entire day to play with social media sites and read blogs so you need to maximize your time online and still find and digest large amounts of information that is relative to you or your business.

One of the problems that I come across is just the amount of time that it takes to find the great blogs to follow. Weeding out the ones that are irrelevant or a waste of time can be a time-consuming and frustrating process, so you need some help.

A cool tool that I came across is called Toluu which let’s you add a feed that you like, and it will find the best results for other, similar blogs. Unfortunately, you have to get invited at this point- they are trying to control the number of registrations so that they don’t overload their system, but that’s how Gmail started out and it won’t last long if they keep up the good work. You can check the site out and request an invite and they will send you one when they have the capacity.

I think this marks the beginning of yet another new breed of web based applications and SaaS (Software as a Service) that will cater to the exponentially growing number of blogs and other social media content that exists. To see a really cool video of the times we live in and how quickly our world is both shrinking and expanding then see our post from a couple of weeks ago about The Speed of Things

Google has introduced a new way for you to mark up your own search results, by giving Google users the ability to move a site that may have ranked 5th in organic results to position number 1. Or maybe a search result that isn’t there and you would like to add it- well, that’s now a possibility!

Google launched their SearchWiki which is a way for users to customize results to best meet their individual needs by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. Check out this video from Google Official Blog

This move certainly has implications for search engine marketers like Valeo as well as for the average Google user. For online marketers, teh ability to have our sites ‘voted’ up or down could have some pretty important ramifications for anyone who relies on organic traffic to drive people their sites.

In order to use this new feature you have to have a Google account and be signed in when you perform a search on Google. You can easily see this in the top-right corner of the page when you go to Google.com and it will show you which account (if any) you are signed in with. This brings up another good point that it is surprising that how Google has made the SearchWiki feature active by default for every Google account. A survery by Search Engine Roundtable suggest that most people (83% at last check) are not ready for the SearchWiki feature.

Google has put the power in the hands of the users on this one, Dave Fleet has some interesting points that the SearchWiki represents the “Diggification” of Google where people can promote, relegate and comment on results; and the unique implications for online marketing and PR:

1. Another place to monitor
2. Increased customer interaction
3. Control by the customer
4. Advantage goes to the existing players
5. More expensive Adwords
6. (Unconfirmed) SEO potential

So why is Google pushing this to all users? Because so many people (roughly 60%) start their searches on Google, so Google has empowered their users. We all know that Google became the 800-pound gorilla of the search engine world by being the leader, so maybe this is the next step. Regardless, we are going to watch this closely because of the implications it could have specific to our customers.