FreeDMG is one of the most powerful and easy to use disk imaging program available for Mac OS X. With this software it is possible to quickly perform disk imaging on the fly. Both the program’s window, and the dock icon can be used for drag-and-drop imaging. There many image formats that that can be chosen (UDZO, UDCO, etc.). FreeDMG can make internet enabled disk images for distribution to Macs as well as ISO/Joliet hybrid images for cross-platform delivery. Verbose preferences, and a built-in log window help users hide/display additional information about the imaging process.

Gain easy access to the many options available for creating and manipulating disk images in Mac OS X with FreeDMG. From the hidden ‘resize’ function of hdiutil to the adjustable compresion levels available for the UDZO format, this software attempts to unveil it all. Users have the option to overwrite exising files, and can choose to quit the program automatically after creating an image on launch. It is possible to encrypt images (password protect) with the click of a button.

With FreeDMG you can attach beautiful html/rtf software license agreements to disk images. This software is currently the best way to add SLAs to disk images for multi-lingual distribution. The license creation process in FreeDMG prevents character loss for all 2-byte languages.

DOWNLOAD NOW (1.2 MB)

(Via MacUpdate – Mac OS X.)

Camtasia Studio has long been the best solution for recording and editing screencasts. It is a wonderful tool for creating tutorials, among other things, by recording the activity on a computer screen. Camtasia users have long thumbed their noses at Mac users, as it has only been available for the Windows platform. Until now.

The folks at Techsmith, makers of Camtasia, have let it slip they are going to release a Mac version on August 25. I am one of the lucky folks who have been beta testing Camtasia for Mac for weeks and all I can tell you (due to NDA) is: get it. As soon as it’s available. It is a superb method to record screens and the editor makes it a breeze to pretty things up.

(Via jkOnTheRun.)

Modern Mac users have no excuses for losing data, and yet too many lose irreplaceable digital photographs, home movies, and personal and work documents, due to having a blasé attitude to backing up, or thinking hard drives are somehow immune from technical problems.

But the harsh reality is this: data you’re not backing-up at least once – and preferably twice – is data you don’t care about.

Although backing-up was perhaps once an arcane, laborious process, that’s far from the truth for today’s Mac user.

In Finder, you can burn any folder to disc via the relevant option in the File menu, or create a ‘burn folder’, drag content to it and within minutes have a back-up of important data to file away in a drawer. (iTunes and iPhoto also have user-friendly back-up options for making disc-based copies of media: File > Library > Back Up to Disc… and Share > Burn, respectively.)

Back in time

Users of Leopard also have access to Time Machine. This application can back-up your documents in the background, even keeping multiple copies of your work, so you can retrieve accidentally deleted items.

To get started with Time Machine, all you need to do is plug in an external hard drive – preferably one that has 50% more storage than your Mac’s internal drive. (1TB drives are now available for as little as £70, and so if you can afford a Mac, you can afford a back-up drive.) A dialog box will appear and once you click ‘Use as Backup Disk’, Time Machine will get on with backing-up.

Be mindful, though, that Time Machine is not a solution that creates a bootable back-up. In the event of a hard-drive failure, you’ll need your Mac OS X installation disc along with the back-up drive to restore your system. If you feel that’s too slow for recovery, applications exist to create a clone of your Mac’s drive, enabling you to get up and running extremely quickly.

Send in the clones

A hard-drive clone is an exact copy of your Mac’s internal drive. Should your Mac’s drive keel over, you can restart, hold Option, select the clone and boot from it. Your down-time is however long that process takes – perhaps a minute or two – although you’ll of course lack files created or amended since the last back-up. If your data is critical, we recommend backing up with Time Machine to one drive and also creating a clone, for the best of both worlds.

One final note: Macs happily read to and write from various hard drive formats, but most drives initially arrive in a format intended for Windows, which may not result in a bootable Mac drive when cloned to. Therefore, when you buy your new external hard drive, reformat it. Connect it to your Mac, launch Disk Utility, click the ‘Partition’ tab, select ‘1 Partition’ from ‘Volume Scheme’, and from the ‘Options’ button, select ‘GUID Partition Table’ if you’ve an Intel Mac or ‘Apple Partition Map’ if you’ve a PowerPC Mac.

MAC FRIENDLY: Reformat new hard drives if they come with a partition scheme that’s more suitable for Windows

The Mac OS X back-up top five

1. Time Machine (part of Mac OS X, £83)

If you’ve got Leopard, you should be using Time Machine. The app costs nothing, works fairly well, and can provide access to previously deleted documents.

2. SuperDuper! ($27.95)

Utterly dependable, SuperDuper! is a first-rate cloning solution that works on any Tiger or Leopard Mac system.

Read TechRadar’s SuperDuper! review.

>

3. Carbon Copy Cloner (donationware)

A strong rival to SuperDuper!, Carbon Copy Cloner is actually superior for scheduling and partial drive copies (such as cloning folder to folder), and has versions that work on Mac OS X 10.2+.

Read TechRadar’s Carbon Copy Cloner review.

4. Twin (about £42)

Newcomer Twin offers plenty of flexibility, enabling you to copy a disk or folder to a local volume, FTP or Amazon S3.

Read TechRadar’s Twin review.

5. Carbonite ($55 per year)

For the truly cautious, off-site back-up provides an extra layer of security. Carbonite is a top offering in this field, providing an automated and Mac-like experience.

Read TechRadar’s Carbonite review.

(Via TechRadar: All latest feeds.)

Often it’s an artist’s second book or album that draws the public’s attention—so too with Apple’s number 2, whose story is excerpted here from Core Memory, photographed by Mark Richards and written by John Alderman.

Name: Apple II
Year created: 1977
Creator: Apple Computer, Inc.
Cost: $1,298 with 4KB of RAM; $2,638 with 48KB of RAM
Memory: 4K semiconductor
Processor: MOS technology 6502

Spurred on by the small but encouraging success of the original Apple, the two Steves, Wozniak and Jobs, retreated to the garage (Jobs’) to craft the personal computer that was the most convincing case yet that such an item could have a mass market. The Apple II started where the Apple I left of, namely, with a case. It didn’t look like an object dropped from a starship or developed in a military lab. It had a familiar, prosaic form of an elongated beige typewriter, though additions like the television monitor and the cassette player used to store programs made it look a little like a college-dorm entertainment center.

If its appearance was familiar, the Apple II was also attractive to consumers in a way that pervious computers just weren’t—even if their manufacturers tried. It shipped with high-resolution color graphics and sound, and it had a rainbow-colored apple logo that seemed both fresh and optimistic. Said Wozniak, ‘The Apple II, more than any other early machine, made computer a word that could be said in homes. It presented a computer concept that included fun and games—human-type things.’ The ability to have a business and a social side was an important sign of computing’s growing relevance.

The price made the Apple II affordable for businesspeople, well-off families, and schools. It was in the education sector that its influence lasted longest—although it certainly made its mark on business as the first platform to run VisiCalc, the first consumer spreadsheet program. It was the programs that really hooked people, and the Apple II had a great roster of educational and entertainment software. By attracting developers, a snowball effect occurred, and a new generation of developers became attracted and then obsessed.

Core Memory is a photographic exploration of the Computer History Museum’s collection, highlighting some of the most interesting pieces in the history of computers. These excerpts were used with permission of the publisher. Special thanks to Fiona!

The top photograph was taken by Mark Richards, whose work has appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Fortune, Smithsonian, Life and BusinessWeek. The eye-candy is accompanied by descriptions of each artifact to cover the characteristics and background of each object, written by John Alderman who has covered the culture of high-tech lifestyle since 1993, notably for Mondo 2000, HotWired and Wired News. A foreword is provided by the Computer History Museum’s Senior Curator Dag Spicer.

Or go see the real things at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.

Gizmodo ‘79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analog age gave way to the digital, and most of our favorite toys were just being born.

(Via Gizmodo.)

SimpleChord is Part tool and part toy, a chord reference and composition tool for Mac OS X. It can show chords, play them, and order them into progressions, and it doesn’t end there.

• Many Musical Possibilities – From power chords to jazz, it’s all there.
• Your Composing Assistant – Arrange chord progressions right in the application to try out new sounds or use it to create accompanyment.
• Have iPod, Will Travel – Chord dictionary and saved progressions can be exported to your iPod.
• Works with MIDI keyboards – Use a MIDI keyboard peripheral to find chords that work with your melodies.
• Print and go – Print out progressions for easy learning when you’re away from the computer.
• Reverse Lookup – Punch in the keys, find out the chord.
• Right on time – Convenient metronome and tempo-finder tools built-in.

DOWNLOAD NOW (5.9′MB) More information

(Via MacUpdate – Mac OS X.)

Time Machine is Apple’s all-in-one backup solution that takes a snapshot of your hard drive and incrementally backs up any files that have changed since the previous backup. The default configuration is pretty sparse; there’s an On/Off slider, Disk Selection, and an Options area where you can exclude folders from the backup.

You might think hourly backups are a bit excessive. Apple does not give you a convenient way to change the default backup schedule. Luckily this is easy. Here are two ways you can change the hourly backup schedule to one of your choosing.

Modifying the system files

If you just want to change the default interval and not schedule anything fancy, follow this method.

Warning: this tutorial involves modifying System files. As always, be sure to make copies of the original files before changing anything.

1. Navigate to

/System/Library/LaunchDaemons

You’ll see a list of .plist files. Scroll until you see com.apple.backupd-auto.plist

2. Make a copy of this file somewhere else on your hard drive.

3. Verify that you (as an administrator of your machine) can Read and Write to this file. Highlight com.apple.backupd-auto.plist and ‘Get Info’ (Command + I). If you don’t see ‘admin – Read & Write’ or ‘[your username] Read & Write’ you’ll need to add yourself to the list.

4. Open this file with a text editor. Property List Editor doesn’t let me save any changes for some reason.

5. In a text editor, find the lines

<key>StartInterval</key>
<integer>3600</integer>

Change 3600 to the amount of time you want between backups in seconds.

6. Save and you’re finished.

Time Machine Editor

Another way to manage your Time Machine backups is the very handy TimeMachineEditor utility. In addition to changing the default backup interval, it allows you to dictate your hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly backup schedules with a very high level of detail.

Assign the rules you want and then click ‘Apply.’

(Via Make Tech Easier.)

>Have you ever wanted to plug in a professional studio mic to your ipod touch/iphone? There may be a commercial solution, but I couldn’t find one. Even if there is one, I figured I could build one cheaper than a ready-made one. You could also use this for a line-in (my original reason for the project), but the source really needs to be taken down to mic level from line level for good sound quality.

The hardest part was finding the 3.5 mm 4 conductor plug (found it at Jameco). The soldering to the plug was a bit tricky too. I needed a cable with at least 4 conductors inside, and I wanted to build this for next-to-nothing, so I used some CAT5 ethernet cable I had. CAT5 has 8 conductors, so if you know of any other common cable with at least 4, you can use that.

(Via MAKE Magazine.)

WordPress is a great blogging platform with a potential of being an easy to use content management system. This is the third article of our four-part series, “The Comprehensive Guide for a Powerful CMS using WordPress”. We are taking a look at 40+ quality and useful WordPress Plug-ins that will turn a simple WordPress site into a blazing fast dynamic one, with easily managed content, that you and your clients will love to use.

Making Your Content Unbreakable

There is one big drawback to using WordPress as a CMS: the lack of custom content types/groups, an area where developers put restrictions on how clients insert content. This is fairly easy to do with some knowledge of custom fields, but can be a little complicated if your client is new to WordPress. Developers must create workarounds to keep the content clean, portable and relatively unbreakable.

1. More Fields Plugin

More Fields is a WordPress plugin that adds boxes to the Write/Edit page. These boxes contains input fields, so that additional (more) fields can be added to a post. For example, if you write about books, you can add a box where you can enter title and author, etc. The boxes can be placed either to the right or to the left on the Write/Edit page.

Download Plugin

2. Creating Custom Content Type with Flutter Plugin

Flutter is made precisely for CMS-making, allows you to create custom Write Panel (Posts, Pages, and Theme Options). This, basically, is a custom content type in which you can add your own fields. So, if a WordPress installation gives you two different content types (Post and Page), Flutter enables you to add more Write Panels to your likings. You can create any type of field (File Uploads, Audio, Video, Checkboxes, Dropdowns) to make as simple as possible for your client or yourself to enter content.

Download Plugin

3. Post Templates Plugin

If you find yourself writing posts and pages on a regular basis which have the same structure, then this plugin would be a great addition to your WordPress plugin arsenal. This could be very useful for clients who have no idea how to get started to write a new page or post. Written by Vincent Prat, Post Templates plugin helps you save time blogging by letting you save and recall templates for writing posts and pages.

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4. WP-CMS Post Control Plugin

This plugin gives you complete control over your write options. It not only allows you to hides unwanted items like custom fields, trackbacks, revisions etc… but also gives you a whole lot more control over how WordPress deals with creating content! This helps you use WordPress more like a CMS, alowing you to totally customise what your authors see and use.

Download Plugin

Managing Users and their Roles

1. User Access Manager Plugin

This plugin is useful if you need a member area or a private section at your blog or you want that other people can write at your blog but not everywhere. Features include:

• User groups
• Set seperate access for readers and editors
• Set access by user groups
• Set access by post categories
• User-defined post/page title (if no access)
• User-defined post/page text (if no access)
• Optional login form (if no access)
• User-defined comment text (if no access)

Download Plugin

2. Role Scoper Plugin

Role Scoper is a comprehensive enrichment for access control in WordPress, giving you CMS-like control of permissions. Assign reading, editing or administration roles to users or groups on a page-specific, category-specific or other content-specific basis.

Download Plugin

3. Role Manager Plugin

This Plugin allows you to define and manage multiple subscriber profiles – called Roles and their Capabilities. Also you can create new Roles and Capabilities.

Download Plugin

4. Member Access Plugin

Member Access allows a WordPress administrator to make individual posts and pages accessible only to logged-in members. Member Access allows global configuration so that all posts or pages can be viewable by everyone (the default) or only by members, and it also allows each post and page to override the global setting.

Download Plugin

Better & Smart Navigation

1. WP-PageNavi Plugin

Adds a more advanced paging navigation your WordPress blog. Example: Pages (17): [1] 2 3 4 » … Last »

Download Plugin

2. Wordpress Navigation List Plugin

The plugin gives you the ability to create unique site navigation from your pages, categories and users using a Drag ‘n Drop Interface; arrange the items within a group in any arbitrary order. Navigation groups may be composed of any combination of pages, categories, Authors, (Editors, Contributors, Subscribers), internal/external links and list dividers. This plugin has a lot of other great features, you have to check it out.

Download Plugin

3. Multi-level Navigation Plugin

Adds an SEO friendly, accessible dropdown/flyout/slider menu to your WordPress blog. The plugin generates the code necessary to create a Son of Suckerfish horizontal dropdown, vertical flyout or horizontal slider menu. The plugin produces W3C valid HTML and CSS and only requires Javascript to function for very old browsers such as IE 6. Check out the demo here. The options page allows you to choose from a range of options including:

• What content will be displayed in the menu
• Animation speed (how fast the dropdowns appear)
• Mouseover delay
• Hide delay
• Add a second menu

Download Plugin

4. Yoast Breadcrumbs Plugin

Breadcrumbs are the links, usually above the title post, that look like “Home > Articles > WordPress SEO”. They are good for two things: a) They allow your users to easily navigate your site. b) They allow search engines to determine the structure of your site more easily.

These breadcrumbs should link back to the homepage, and the category the post is in. This plugin allows you to add breadcrumbs to your theme.

5. Simple Sidebar Navigation Plugin

This plugin adds a widget into the Widgets dashboard that allows in a simple way, without writing any PHP code on your part, to create custom navigation in any sidebar pre-defined by your WP theme. Features include:

• Flat and multi-level navigation hierarchy for existing pages and custom links.
• Very flexible conditional appearance options.
• Out-of-the-box Suckerfish support.
• Option to add navigation links with custom title, url and target attribute.
• Unlimited number of navigation widgets.
• Optional setting includes blog posts into the navigation selection list (only pages are available by default).
• Support for custom drop-down menus CSS.

Download Plugin

Having a Multilingual Site

Writing multilingual content is already hard enough, so why go extra mile without making sure you already have a good plan to manage translation on your blog. Check out the plugins below that will help you have a fully featured multilingual CMS.

1. WPML Multilingual CMS Plugin

Turns WordPress sites into a fully featured multilingual content management system (CMS). WPML helps it go the extra mile. Features include: 1) Multilingual content support based on Drupal i18n architecture. 2) CMS navigation allows adding drop down menus, breadcrumbs trail and sidebar navigation (all wigetized). 3) Creates internal Sticky Links so that they never break. You can read more about the capabilities of this powerful plugin here.

Download Plugin

2. xLanguage Plugin

xLanguage is a full featured plugin allows you to blog in different language, and allows user to select which version to read. It works for blog post, page, tags, categories. The user language preferences will also select the right theme and plugins MO files.

Download Plugin

3. qTranslate Plugin

qTranslate makes creation of multilingual content as easy as working with a single language. Here are some features:

• qTranslate Services – Professional human and automated machine translation with two clicks
• One-Click-Switching between the languages – Change the language as easy as switching between Visual and HTML
• Language customizations without changing the .mo files – Use Quick-Tags instead for easy localization
• Multilingual dates out of the box – Translates dates and time for you
• Comes with a lot of languages already builtin! – English, German, Simplified Chinese and a lot of others

Download Plugin

Easily Manage Categories, Pages and Posts

1. Idealien Category Enhancements Plugin

Manage category templates as easily as you manage page templates. Select which apply through the post > categories menu using file names that make sense, not category ID numbers. Now any views of the category (or sub-categories) will render the according to the category template selected. Posts in a given category can also use a category-based template.

Download Plugin

2. pageMash > Page Management Plugin

Customise the order your pages are listed in and manage the parent structure with this simple ajax drag-and-drop administrative interface with an option to toggle the page to be hidden from output. Great tool to quickly re-arrange your page menus.

Download Plugin

3. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site. Using a customizable algorithm considering post titles, content, tags, and categories, YARPP calculates a “match score” for each pair of posts on your blog.

Download Plugin

4. Exclude Pages Plugin

This plugin adds a checkbox, “include this page in menus”, which is checked by default. If you un-check it, the page will not appear in any listings of pages (which includes, and is usually limited to, your page navigation menus).

Download Plugin

5. WP No Category Base Plugin

As the name suggests this plugin will completely remove the mandatory ‘Category Base’ from your category permalinks ( e.g. myblog.com/category/my-category/ to myblog.com/my-category/ ).

Download Plugin

SEO

Wordpress by default is pretty decent at letting search engines see what’s going on. But there are a whole bunch of plugins that can be used to make your blog rank better.

1. Google XML Sitemaps Plugin

This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

Download Plugin

2. All in One SEO Pack Plugin

Optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engines: page titles, meta tags, keywords, and descriptions. This plugin allows you to configure them for either your entire blog or on a post by post basis.

Download Plugin

3. Redirection Plugin

Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. This is particularly useful if you are migrating pages from an old website, or are changing the directory of your WordPress installation.

Download Plugin

4. Permalinks Moved Permanently Plugin

If you just migrated your Wordpress blog from one permalink structure to another, and you don’t want to lose Pagerank or traffic that accesses your blog through the old permalinks, this is for you.

Download Plugin

5. SEO Smart Links Plugin

SEO Smart Links provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, nofollow and much more. SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.

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6. Platinum SEO Pack Plugin

This is an improvised version of the AllinOne SEO plugin. It does everything that AllinOne was doing and also some extra cool features. It takes care of pretty much everything, a bit more advanced than a basic SEO plugin but easy to use as well.

Download Plugin

Highly customizable Widgets

1. Widgets Reloaded Plugin

Widgets Reloaded replaces many of the default widgets with versions that allow much more control. Widgets come with highly customizable control panels. Each widget can also be used any number of times.

Download Plugin

2. Flexi Pages Widget Plugin

Flexi Pages Widget is a highly configurable WordPress sidebar widget to list pages and sub-pages. Can be used as an alternative to the default ‘Pages’ widget. Features include:

• Option to display sub-pages only in parent page and related pages.
• Option to select and exclude certain pages from getting displayed in the list. Alternatively, only certain pages can be displayed by using the ‘include’ option.
• Option to include a link to the home page.
• Other options include title, sort column/order, hierarchical/flat format, show date.
• Multiple instances of the widget. Unlimited number of instances of the widget can be added to the sidebar.

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3. SidePosts Widget Plugin

With this widget you select the category you want, and all entries with this category, will be shown on the sidebar instead the main blog. You will have then a small blog on the sidebar for those special entries. For each entry, you have the link to the post page. You can select the number to post to show and if must show only the post excerpt or the full post content (Also excerpt with thumbnails can be shown).

Download Plugin

4. Query Posts Widget Plugin

This widget has everything you’ll ever need to show posts on your site without touching code. It’s like having a WordPress developer ready to do your bidding all wrapped up in a widget. All you need is a theme that’s widgetized.

It lets you displays posts by nearly any criteria you can imagine using the query_posts() function, except you don’t need to know anything about PHP to use it. You can do all kinds of neat things: Posts by tag, Posts by category, Posts by author, Posts by time/date, Posts by custom field key and/or value, Choose any number, Show pages, Show the full post, excerpt, or even order them in a list, and much more…

Download Plugin

Must Check Plugins

1. Search Everything Plugin

Search Everything increases the ability of the default Wordpress Search, options included: Search Every Page, Search Every Tag, Search Every Category, Search non-password protected pages only, Search Every Comment, Search Every Custom Field, Exclude Posts from search, Exclude Categories from search and more.

Download Plugin

2. Subscribe2 Plugin

Subscribe2 provides a comprehensive subscription management and email notification system for WordPress blogs that sends email notifications to a list of subscribers when you publish new content to your blog. Email Notifications can be sent on a per-post basis or periodically in a Digest email.

Download Plugin

3. Exec-PHP Plugin

The Exec-PHP plugin executes PHP code in posts, pages and text widgets. Features include

• Executes PHP code in the excerpt and the content portion of your posts and pages
• Configurable execution of PHP code in text widgets (for WordPress 2.2 or higher)
• Write PHP code in familiar syntax, eg.

Download Plugin

4. WP e-Commerce Plugin

The WP e-Commerce shopping cart plugin for WordPress is an elegant easy to use fully featured shopping cart application suitable for selling your products, services, and or fees online.

Download Plugin

5. NextGEN Gallery Plugin

NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option. It can turn a regular blog into a powerful photo-blog while giving you all the tools to manage it efficiently and easily.

Download Plugin

6. Contact Form 7 Plugin

Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

Download Plugin

7. Viper’s Video Quicktags Plugin

Tired of copying and pasting the embed HTML from sites like YouTube? Then this plugin is for you. Simply click one of the new buttons that this plugin adds to the write screen (rich editor included) and then paste the URL that the video is located at into the prompt box — easy as that. You can fully configure how the videos are displayed (width, height, colors, alignment on the page) and much more.

Download Plugin

(via Noupe)

One of the great things about the current web landscape is that the barrier to entry for entrepreneurs to create great new social media sites is very low. Open source, falling hardware and bandwidth costs, and social media itself (which can be used as a viral marketing vehicle), mean that enterprising developers can more easily than ever create amazing new services. That’s great for consumers because it facilitates a lot of competition that leads to the best possible products.

But it also means that most people end up using more than just a couple of social sites. We might use one site for sharing photos, another for sharing videos, and a couple more for sharing links. The content we create on those sites makes up our social media identity, and as we use more sites, it becomes increasingly difficult to share it all from one place. Yesterday, I received an email from a friend whose signature had links to no less than eight social media profiles. Thankfully, there are better ways to share your social media identity. Below are five sites that offer social media badges you can share and embed.

1. Retaggr

Retaggr is a really well put together utility that lets users create a social media profile card, which not only displays links to your other social profiles, but includes a bio, picture, and other vital information. Most impressively, though, profile cards are interactive. Retaggr profile cards have built in widgets that let you display some of your social media content – blog posts, recent photos, tweets, etc. – directly inside your card. That means that not only can the profile cards point people toward all the pieces of your social media identity, but in many cases people can actually view your social media content without having to navigate away from wherever you’ve embedded the card.

Retaggr supports a very large number of websites, is embeddable, and can generate image-based cards for email and forum signatures. The company also operates the Add Me Button, which is a utility that allows users to create a single button linking visitors to all of their social media profiles.

2. Geek Chart

Geek Chart offers a unique spin on social media identity sharing. Rather than just make it easy to display links to your various social profiles, Geek Chart puts your social media use in perspective by letting you show exactly where you are most active. The site lets you create a clickable pie chart of your social media profiles that depicts your use of each site over the past 30 days — if you haven’t used a site in 30 days, the chart will not include that profile.

Geek Chart currently supports eight services, including Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Digg. It gets bonus points for allowing users to create a chart without signing up — though you can only embed the chart if you do. Users also get a profile page with a simple lifestream. Here’s one for US President Barack Obama, for example.

3. DuckDuckGo Karma

The Karma badge from alternative search engine DuckDuckGo is easily the most simple widget on this list. Essentially, Karma only displays social media links for sites that have some sort of ranking system, such as followers, points, or friends. It requires no sign up to create and works with 15 different sites.

DuckDuckGo also offers a Profiles widget, which supports a bunch more sites, but doesn’t display any ranking information. It’s just as easy to create, but perhaps a bit less interesting.

4. DandyID

If you want a profile badge service that supports that obscure, niche social network you’re active on, then DandyID is likely for you. DandyID offers a profile management service that is perhaps most impressive for the sheer number of services it supports: over 300. Once you’ve added your services – a process made less daunting by DandyID’s clever use of the Google Social Graph API, which finds and suggests your profile links after you’ve added the first couple – the site can generate JavaScript or image-based embeds to share your social profile links more easily, and also gives each user its own profile page, similar to Retaggr.

For developers, DandyID offers an API that lets web site owners push and pull profile and identity graph information, which has led to interesting mashups like this Firefox extension, which can automatically look up social profiles for people as you browse the web.

Full disclosure: I was formerly employed by DandyID.

5. FriendFeed

Of course, being a full featured lifestreaming service and social network in its own right, FriendFeed offers a lot more than just the ability to create and embed social profile information – but they do offer that service, so they deserve a place on this list.

FriendFeed supports 58 social media services, and their embeddable ‘FriendFeed Badge’ widget lets you share links to your profiles on all of them, as well as your activity on FriendFeed (which as you can tell from the screenshot above probably isn’t as much as it should be in my case). One of the great things about FriendFeed’s widget is that you can fully customize the CSS to make it match the look and feel of wherever you plan to embed it. Rival lifestreaming service Profilatic offers a similar badge widget, as do many other lifestreaming services.

(Via Mashable!.)

Twitter is now more than three years only and is onbly just beginning to be adopted by business as a communications tool.