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Local deal sites are seemingly becoming a new bandwagon, and one that looks set to run for a while given the current economic climate – who can resist a good deal? Dealquad has jumped firmly on board and is targeting college students for its business model. Unlike Groupon and the other deal sites, DealQuad works directly with college newspapers to match local students to equally local deals. Incidentally, college newspapers also benefit. So far, DealQuad has made deals with Harvard, U Michigan, and U Washington with more in the pipeline.

DealQuad uses the familiar group buying scheme where each deal needs a certain amount of buyers before it becomes active. This incentivises students to invite their friends via the handy Facebook, Twitter and plain email sharing tools built into the website. Anything between 35-50% can go back to DealQuad and the participating paper. There is a bit of a twist to the sit:, when signing up for DealQuad you can join a group like a fraternity, club or charity organisation. If significant numbers of users sign up for the deal, then the group with most amount of sign-ups wins a small cash prize.

Good for everyone it would seem! As expected deals are targeted at younger audience groups from local business exploiting that community loyalty often seen in university towns. Website creators have commented that their deal site is a good way for students to make that student loan go even further.

If you’re big on social media and the connected Web 2.0, then you’ll want to see RockMelt.  This is a new browser that has been in development for two years and has finally entered early release beta.

The company behind the browser was funded by Netscape founder Marc Andressen.  The browser is all about sharing with your social networks.

In the beta version, you log in using your Facebook ID.   Probably it’s biggest feature is this: very page you visit can be instantly shared on your Facebook, Twitter, and other accounts via the giant “Share” button at the top of the browser.

There are two border rails.  Your favorite Facebook friends (as you define them) and their updates are shown along the left rail of the browser.  On the right hand side is another rail which is for site feeds.

The left rail has thumbnails of your friends from Facebook, which you can organize by “favorite” as you wish.  Hovering over any of those thumbs brings up a popup with their latest status update and an indicator showing whether they’re online or not.  If they’re online, their Facebook stream is shown as well as an instant chat box so you can communicate.

The right rail houses site feeds from any site or sites you’d like.  You can literally put anything there – Gmail, Twitter, blogs, whatever.  Notifications will appear whenever something new is posted and clicking on them will give a popup with the first few words (usually a headline).  Clicking on that will open a new tab to show you the new content. Every one of these feeds has a Share button attached as well, so you can share it from your right rail without opening a new tab.

There are other innovations with search and so forth.  The browser is a great, new way of viewing the Web and worth trying.  It probably won’t become your only browser, but if you’re a real social media nut, then you’ll likely really enjoy it as a great tool for bringing together your surfing and sharing.

Fans of the Getting Things Done (GTD) techniques recognize the power that lists have over the chaos and disorganised approach to modern living. So it should come as no surprise that there are many tools available for GTD devotees to do this. And a lot of them seem to reside firmly in the cloud with the newest addition being Workflowy. Workflowy, backed by the Y Combinator  start-up fund, aims to become your external brain and tries to do this as easily as possible thanks to the clean and slick interface created by Jesse Patel and Mike Turtzin.

According to Workflowy, almost everything you create on Google Docs is a list. Quite a bold statement but one that many can understand. To that end, Workflowy starts with a blank slate which can be intimidating. The makers suggest starting with separate lists for goals, projects, and chores instead of the usual single to do list. The fun really begins with the ability to create sub categories, complete tasks and to hide tasks. It’s all very easy to use and fast – as quickly as you can brain storm, Workflowy can capture and organize.

Workflowy is quite late-to-market with organization sites such as Evernote already commanding large numbers of loyal followers. However, Workflowy is simple and focuses on one purpose:  list making. Initially, the site will try to gather followers thanks to its free beta and eventually will transition to the freemium model in an effort to generate income. May more improvements and features are on the way and, even though it can’t complete tasks on your behalf, it’s pretty good at helping you get organized.

Stribe, winners of the LeWeb start-up competition, has recently released an API that should make its offering even more useful to webmasters. With the rise of social networking, web sites have been trying to drive traffic by tapping into the web 2.0 scene.

There are many ways to do this e.g. Facebook, Ning or Meebo. However the big drawback is that these networks do not operate as part of your own website. You lose control over user interface issues and behind the scenes coding as it’s not actually your network that facilitates the social side of things.

This is where Stribe steps in. Stribe’s goal is to move the network back to your site and it does that by placing a social networking layer over any site. It’s free and very easy for web developers to add to sites. The interface can be customised, for example the bar colour can be changed to fit with another colour scheme or banished all together.

Stribe provides built-incentives for members of your community, including the ability to accumulate points, customizable badges and the ability to access all Stribed websites using only one set of login details.

Not only do your web visitors find a way to communicate with each other without leaving your site, they also tap into the Stribe community, one that’s rapidly growing. Scribe can also help you to discover websites that are in the same line of business that you are.

The search for relevance seems never-ending.  Google is undeniably the search king and Bing might be considered a prince, but few others even register on the search engine map.  Now there’s Blekko, yet another attempt by a fledgling search engine to get into the market.

Unlike the others, though, Blekko might actually get somewhere.  Why?  Because it’s unique and relevant – two things most other search startups can’t really claim, though many try.

First of all, Blekko is crowd sourced.  So searches are refined by other people using the system, in the same way Wikipedia is written and edited by others.  As the Blekko founder’s blog says:

Not everyone has to participate for the model to work – most people don’t edit Wikipedia, yet we have a vast encyclopedia which long ago dwarfed the closed Britannica.

But a small fraction of the web audience that does get involved can help make the search experience better for everyone else.

That makes the blog unique.  The blog is relevant because it specializes in what are called “vertical” searches.  These are category-based searches that are narrowed (refined) by the category they fall into.  On Google, when you search for a topic and then click the News link, you’re narrowing the search into a vertical space based on the News category.  Blekko lets you do that, but with anything as a category.

So a search for “Time Zone in California /encyclopedia” would give you results for the phrase “Time Zone in California” in the vertical zone (category) “encyclopedia.”

This has the potential to give excellent results.

Blekko has been in closed beta for some time and has only now gone live to the public.  It’s worth a try and may become something you add to your search arsenal.