Most of us don’t mind giving up a part of our privacy for our personal protection (airport scanners), or a good deal (loyalty shopping programs). We even voluntarily sign up for social networking sites that track every move we make and then sell aggregate information to marketers. But what about

Search millions of conversations from social networks, blogs and other social media channels with BackType.com. You’ll also see what’s currently popular and being talked about on the web. This is not the only search engine for social media websites, but one more useful tool when it comes to tracking trends

Internet user statistics and language statistics from around the world can be found at the InternetWorldStats.com website. There are internet statistics from each of the seven continents and the countries within each continent. The website also offers population numbers per country, internet users and number of broadband connections within each

Create your own social news website with the free service at SlinkSet.com. Add feeds from your favorite blogs (or your own website) and allow people to add their own items as well. You get a custom URL and within your settings you can decide to make the site public or

Track your website’s keywords throughout the social media world with SamePoint. It pulls up results from user generated content such as blogs, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Wikipedia, Simpy, Digg, Delicious, YouTube, Facebook and other sites. Use this site to see what people are publishing in real-time and what’s trending. What makes this

Experiment with different colors and images with the easy to work background designer tool at BGPatterns. Scale, rotate and change the opacity of the images, as well as the overall background texture and color. The tool works in ‘real time’ and there is no need to refresh the page with

Browse through thousands of pre-colored seamless pattern backgrounds at PatternCooler. All artwork on this site can be used freely for web and graphic design projects, blogs, Twitter, scrapbooking, MySpace profiles, mobile phone wallpapers etc. The site offers some great retro and modern designs:   Related posts: More Design Inspiration Bird