Online stopwatch and timer

Tuesday tool:

Now this is really cool. I just successfully used it to time my preschooler's timeout. Check out the online stopwatch, which doubles as a timer if you click "count down."

Obamicons

Midweek Curiosity:

Make your own CHANGE image (or any other Obamicon) at ObamiconMe.

Favicon Generator

Tuesday Tool:

Of several favicon generators I tried, this one worked the best.

Hellotxt.com

Hellotxt.com is a status updater similar to Ping.fm. Both allow you to update all your social networks (Plurk, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) at once with a single post.

Google Flu

Tuesday Tool:

Google keyword data can be used to track flu activity around the U.S. Google reports the data to the CDC. Yes, that means the government. But the government has always had an interest in public health — the threat of privacy violations here is low.

E-Mealz

E-Mealz is an interesting concept. They do all your meal planning &mdash including checking out your local supermarket's sales and creating a shopping list.

Death Clock

If I were on the ball, I would have posted this macabre site on Halloween. Get an idea of your expected life-span.

Entrecard

There are so many blog catalogs, blogger social networks, blog link share sites, and so forth that I cannot even keep track of them. I've signed up for a few and put them on some of my blogs' sidebars, but I don't even remember anything about them.

This is different:

Entrecard is a cool, not-too-time-consuming, useful way to share advertising among blogs. Notice the Entrecard widget on the left sidebar here. Go check it out.

Retail Me Not

Retail Me Not has coupon codes for sites all over the web, and collects data on users' success rate with them.

Wordle

Create a word cloud for your blog or other website with Wordle. Very cool.

Ping.fm

To quickly update multiple sites, use Ping.fm with this code: pingitlikeitshot

I use Ping.fm to update Plurk (my favorite), Twitter, Identi.ca, and this blog.

TinyURL

If you must include a long URL in a print medium (no copy-paste) or if you are using a site that limits you to a certain number of characters such as Twitter or Plurk, you can shorten links by plugging them into TinyURL.

Hakia

Forget Google for research. Hakia is still in beta, but appears much more useful as a research tool, since it does rankings based on reliability of a source rather than on web statistics.