Topsy listens to the conversations taking place all the time on the living, social web. This is the rapidly growing, exciting world of Twitter, Blogs, Flickr, Digg, Yelp, Identica and many other communities. People use these communities to share reviews, opinions, messages, comments and discussions about things. Topsy indexes those things. Topsy indexes what people are talking about. The first index is based exclusively on Twitter statuses and the wonderful people who write them.

This is what a typical search page on Topsy looks like. You see the website and underneath in the speech bubble are the number of times that link has been tweeted. On the right hand side you can see the twitter users who tweet about this topic the most, and on the left side you can narrow down your search down to the last hour!

Another really useful way to use Topsy is to find out more information about people on twitter. Topsy has a page for every person it listens to. Tracking all the links that person tweets.

I was surprised when I looked up my twitter name. Topsy had determined that I was “highly influential” and had already added tags to my tweets.

And if that wasn’t enough to blow your socks off, take a look at this. Topsy has “trackback” pages for everything in its index, showing what everyone is saying about that thing.

I am not sure if Topsy can see who tweets what links if they are bit.ly or tinyurl links, because if it can, then this is a much better way to track the reach of a tweet or a link on twitter, regardless of what url shortening service people are using.

So that’s Topsy. Let me know what you think about it.

One of the plugins that I discovered is wp-greet box. It’s a great plugin for blogs that get a lot of random search or referrer traffic. The plugin will load a small message at the top of a post if someone has arrived on that post as the result of a link. But the plugin goes beyond that. It recognises where the traffic came from (google, stumbleupon, facebook, twitter, etc) and give the visitor a customized message based on that.

If the visitor is on your site because of a random google search (I get traffic like this a lot) It will let the visitor know that they can subscribe to your rss feed if they like what they see. But it also has the ability to display what they were searching for on google and show other posts on the site that they may be interested in.

I have my twitter updates feed into my facebook status. Because of this I get a lot of blog traffic from facebook when I tweet a link. This plugin will give your facebook friends the option to share the post they are viewing on facebook.

As many of my readers know, I love twitter! So you can imagine that I was happy when I saw that this plugin had twitter support. The message will let readers tweet a link to the post using TwiThis. The plugin also puts a link to follow me on twitter if perhaps you found the link through a re-tweet and you weren’t following me already.

Currently the following referrers are installed by default, but you can easily create your own if your favorite referrer is not on the list!

1. blinklist.com
2. blogmarks.com
3. del.icio.us
4. delicious.com
5. digg.com
6. diigo.com
7. facebook.com
8. flickr.com
9. furl.com
10. google.com
11. ma.gnolia.com
12. mister-wong.com
13. myspace.com
14. netvibes.com
15. newsvine.com
16. reddit.com
17. search.live.com
18. search.msn.com
19. search.yahoo.com
20. simpy.com
21. stumbleupon.com
22. technorati.com
23. twitter.com
24. youtube.com