This list is written from our perspective, as technology bloggers, but we suspect that many of the links and ideas below will prove useful in other contexts, as well.

Two tools that do exist that we like a lot are the FriendFeed Best of Day feature and the MyBlogLog recommended posts widget for WordPress.

First Finders

There may or may not be any such thing as a tipping point or a mysterious group of otherwise random market influencials online, but we're pretty sure that are people who consistently find cool things before other people. We'd like to know who they are so we can look over their shoulder.

This is something that social bookmarking tool Furl.net at least used to do really well - they'd recommend users whose archives are similar to yours and you can choose which ones to subscribe to.

Nowadays we're not sure if there's any service that really does what we're looking for, so we're muscling through some data crunching by hand. This is the one work-around on this list that we can't tell you about for competitive reasons - but we will say that if you want to find out what's cool in web tech, early, you should pay attention to user experience designer Angus Fraser. We've never met Angus but the numbers we're running say he's our kind of guy. (Hi Angus!)

We'll introduce you to more of the people that our experimental system is telling us to watch when we credit them for stories and cool websites they helped us find before our competitors have.

What You, Our Readers, Might Like

We'd like to have have, as one of our sources of story leads, an automated system that could suggest links that our community of readers would likely enjoy given their similarity to other things that we know you like already.

We know what some of you are interested in, anecdotally, through systems like MyBlogLog's BlogJuice (right) but we'd love to get systematic access to that kind of data. We probably could if we decide to dedicate the resources to it.

Touchstone Sharers

Everyone wants to know who the big influencers are in social networks. Unscrupulous types want to buy them off but we'd just like to make sure we're in the orbits of the relevant ones. They find good things and they are good to be found by.

For example, you may know that super networker Robert Scooble is coo-coo-for-cocoa-puffs over FriendFeed. (As are we, it's great.) But you may not know that there are apparently more influential people there than Scoble, too. In one 8 hour period recently we counted the number of other people who "liked" the same items that Scoble liked on FriendFeed and found 254 people clustered around his promoted items. During that same period items liked by Mona N. were liked by 357 people! That's why some people in the know call Mona the Queen of FriendFeed.

We'd like a tool that introduced us to those types of people in various social networks we participate in.