It’s safe to add youtego to the latest iteration of social networking tools. While youtego may be carving out a unique niche, the end goal is nothing new: meeting people with similar qualities over the Internet.

Much like Facebook, youtego is built upon individual user profiles. However, this is where youtego goes off in a different direction. Rather than the usual profile structure of listed biographical information, youtego wants you to be more creative. By filling in prompts such as “I can” and “I love,” you build a less conventional, more artistic snapshot of yourself. Rather than posting your extended educational background, for example, you post an interest in stargazing. Each of your profile items needs an icon, so be prepared to provide your own images. Each time you fill in your profile, you are “tagging your ego,” hence “tego.” In this sense, using youtego is supposed to be an introspective experience, prompting you to think about yourself in a qualitative manner. Youtego advertises as an exercise in “self-visualization.” The downside of this is that the profiles are limited in scope. What they gain in artistic value they lose in terms of hard facts.

Once you’ve built a profile, of course, the next step is to join the youtego online community. Someone with similar content in his or her profile will become your “TegoMate.” This part is fairly standard with only a few minor innovations.

While youtego’s approach to profile construction is certainly more unique and wholesome, it’s still about joining an online community. Yes, creating your profile may lead to some introspection, but beyond that, you can’t do very much.

The creators of lazyfeed have made it even easier for internet addicts to get their fix. Rather than checking up on multiple online news and entertainment outlets, users can take advantage of one-stop shopping at lazyfeed. By funneling the latest stories on a wide variety of subjects onto one page, the website always has something new.

Users begin by setting their preferences for information consumption. The preferences, such as “Sports,” “Politics,” or “Cooking,” each then become “tiles” on the user’s homepage. As a tile, the preference occupies a square within your lazyfeed homepage. As lazyfeed scans millions of web pages, it will post updates to the relevant tiles much like an item is added to a post-it list. It should be noted that the user comes up with his or her original preferences. I was able to type in preferences as varied as “Taxonomy” and “Barack Obama.” Lazyfeed uses these as taglines in its constant trawl through the Internet.

Updates to your tiles are always flowing in, literally allowing you to sit and watch new items arrive for you to read. If you’d like, you can click through to view the posted items on their original web pages. Sources for lazyfeed posts are wide and varied: some from major, reputable news sites like Nytimes.com, and others from small, independent blogs.

While lazyfeed does provide you with the latest on practically any topic, I found that it doesn’t supplant a conventional news website or television show. Lazyfeed caters to your personal interests. As such, Lazyfeed is the latest for those who love to procrastinate.

Omeka, which you download from the Internet, is a totally free software that allows you to publish independent work or collections to the Internet. Much like an elementary school student would create a project with posters and visuals, Omeka users insert various file types to make their projects. Omeka software can harness all types of files for display on the internet, including documents, videos, audio, powerpoints etc. Advertised for librarians and curators, it offers a unique way to present material. Rather than write long essays, researchers and academics could use various media types to display their recent research projects on the internet. By appealing to the viewer’s multiple senses, users create comprehensive presentations. All metadata is secure since Omeka uses the international Dublin Core standard.

Omeka is particularly suited for academics because it is designed for users with minimal computer knowledge. Omeka projects are built using templates, much like building a website except uniquely content-related. Users don’t have to worry about file size since Omeka has an enormous file storage capacity (advertised as only limited by the user’s server). Finally, much like WordPress, Omeka is still evolving. Since Omeka is an open-source software, plugins are still being developed to enhance the program. One notable plugin is “Geolocation,” which allows the user to make plots along a Google Map.

To sample some Omeka projects, you can view certain “showcases” on their website. Most are impressively designed and have glossy layouts.