Do have you a blog? Do you like word clouds? Do you wear shirts? Well then do I have a web site for you!

Just follow these three easy steps:

1) Go to SnapShirts.com, click "Custom" and enter your blog address:

2) Generate your word cloud:

3) Order your shirt:

It’s just that easy!

So what’s got two thumbs and loves his blog word cloud T-shirt?

Have you heard about Digsby? I was turned onto this by Scott Bauer and am a daily user of it now. Digsby is basically an email and social network aggregator:

It periodically checks your accounts for new messages, so that you don’t have to have all your different email accounts open (especially if you have more than one account at the same provider like Gmail which means you can’t have multiple tabs open and be logged into each account at the same time… but I digress). Via a flyout menu, you can quickly see an overview of all your unread messages and open, reply, or delete them right there. But that’s not the most intriguing aspect of Digsby. Where I see the most promise is the chat feature. You can put a widget on your blog which people that visit your site can interact with:

It tells the user if I’m online and if so allows them to start typing away. I’ll get a popup IM window via the Digsby client on my desktop and the chat has commenced. Google has a similar feature with their Google Talk embedded widget, but it’s much clunkier. Here’s Aaron Lerch’s impromptu description of it:

I got an IM via google talk with a big-@$$ web link, which I click and it takes me to a page that has a "launch talk" button, which pops a window that is the web version of google talk and includes a "Guest chat" tab.

Yeah… Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll stick with Digsby. Also, if you were paying attention you would have seen the "Digsby Widget 5/7" in the first screenshot. That tells me how many people are currently on my blog and whether they’re active or not. Sure, you can see that sorta stuff with Google Analytics or Feedburner:

However, unlike Google and Feedburner Digsby’s stats are in real time. Those are people that are on my site at this very second. I can even initiate the chat with them if I wanted to. Pretty sweet. Sure, that may not scale well in the future, but I’m a long ways from that being a problem…

Digsby is pretty full featured and supports Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, IMAP, POP, Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter… although for Twitter you’re really better off with Bitter

So if you break out of your feed reader and ever visit my blog, give the widget a try. I’m a nice guy. We can chat. Here I’ll give you a topic. Duran Duran is neither a Duran nor a Duran. Discuss…

There’s a great new plug-in for Wordpress blogs called Socialize-Me. It looks at the HTTP referer field and if it’s a social networking site that you’ve configured the plugin to recognize, it shows a link to your profile to whoever is visiting your site. A pretty simple yet powerful concept. It lets you extend your social network from the site the network is on out in to your own blog. Sounds to me like a pretty nifty way grow your network.

Installation is as easy as any other WP plugin. You simply copy the folder into your plugins folder, activate the plugin on your Wordpress dashboard, then just tell it your usernames for each profile you have. The content it adds doesn’t take your theming into consideration:

but after a little javascript and CSS hacking you can make it match:

I have it set up for Digg, Flickr, Pownce, Facebook and a few others:

And considering I’m not in high school, that’s probably a few too many…