Where do you go to find the best new tools on the web?  That question is too easy; the answer is Google, of course.  Have you spent much time in Google Labs lately? That was where I first found Google Talk and Gmail, both of which are my primary IM client and personal email system respectively. There are a couple of treasures in the lab that I thought I’d bring to your attention: Google Reader, Google Voice Local Search, Experimental Search, and Google Trends.  Some of them are must haves for the blogger while others are just plain cool.   :cool:

Google Reader:

I won’t spend much time on this one because studying my feed subscribers in FeedBurner, I notice that many of you already use it. 41% of my subscribers currently use it.

While that number includes users of Google Reader as well as iGoogle, I am guessing that a majority are using the reader. For those of you that don’t know, Google Reader is a nice, clean web interface to manage all your RSS and Atom subscriptions. You are able to break your feeds up and group them by folder to better organize your time spent reading all those quality blogs. Don’t forget, you can subscribe to my feed at any time. As with any of Google’s services, you can get to this info from any web browser.

Google Voice Local Search:

This is one that I just learned of about 2 days ago. I haven’t had an opportunity to test it yet, but I am definately interested. Just dial 1-800-GOOG-411 and use their voice recognition application to find a business number and get connected to them for free. A perfect example of when I would use this service is when I’m out and about with friends and we decide to catch a movie. I don’t have all the local theaters phone numbers in my cell phone address book, so I’ve had to dial 411 to get connected and pay those service charges. Now, I can just call Google, say “Movie Theater” and get connected for free. If you’ve tried it, let me know what you think.

Experimental Search:

It looks like Google isn’t resting on their laurels, but are continuing to make our browsing and search experience better. You can now view your search results in either a timeline or on a map. For example, check out the results for “the history of the Internet“. It goes way back to the 1840′s! But the technology in this section that has the most potential, for me anyways, is the keyboard shortcuts. The current batch in the lab is:

Make your first search navigation using keyboard shortcuts a search for BlissLogs. Notice they even give you all these shortcuts on the right side of the browser.

Google Trends:

This particular application in the Google Labs could have the most benefit for us Bloggers. Blog promotion is all about choosing keywords. Whether it is determining the anchor text to ask for when you exchange links with fellow bloggers, entering the best keywords to be your anchor text when commenting on other blogs (That’s right, don’t always use your name.), or choosing which keywords to bid on when starting to utilize Google Adwords; choosing the right keywords is crucial. Who could describe what it is better than Google themselves?

With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched for on Google over time. Google Trends also displays how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and which geographic regions have searched for them most often.

I see that my recent proud declaration of being an amateur blogger could get me more traffic from France.

I wonder if they are looking for a site like mine or something a little more “Adult” in nature. Well, if I decide to market those keywords, I now have a better idea of where some additional traffic will come from, and maybe I can personalize it for their benefit.  See what you can do by utilizing both Google Trends and Google Analytics to better promote your site.

Happy Blogging!