absolutely true about throttling your linkbuilding. Slow, steady and relevant.

I took a look at this site, and while I am not completely finished seeing if there is any value. You can check your analytics / webmaster tools and see if that site refers traffic, brings users, or the link is valuable enough to show up in any number of linkbuilding tools. That being said, any link that is contextually valid, and brings ANY users to your site is a win. Given that DIIGO's deal is to tag and annotate pages it would seem valid as the context is definitely related to the site it will link to. The next question would be are the links follow? can google see, crawl and index the pages?

Cheers,

TODD

Hola!

google has this to say about submitting sitemaps "Submit a Sitemap to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover." ala Webmaster tools. I stand firmly behind your inkling to create a good standard issue sitemap and submit. Last week we had a client (attorney) who did not have a sitemap at all for the three years her site was up, google had about 22 pages in its index, after sitemap, 432 pages in its index.  Be sure to submit to BIng webmaster tools as well, cover all bases!

so I say create right away, its not going to hurt anything, and can quite honestly help a lot! as a footnote to this answer, if you are using videos, etc... on the site be sure to build a video sitemap as well we have been seeing a lot successful indexing of our clients media.

Hope this helps!

The plain old simple fact about deleting twitter accounts is that you will lose followers and potential opportunity to shed some light on your brand and service (no to mention build some pretty solid links to great content). The idea in having foreign twitter accounts is to be able to adequately represent the locals in their own language, destroying the language barrier and bringing everyone a warm fuzzy. So take a good look at your referral sources, conversions from twitter vs the amount of time and energy your staff is taking to manage all these accounts. That equation should spit out a suitable response.

That being said my two companies have 1 twitter account each and employees are able to create their own and tweet as they wish (within reason) we have been able to get followers from most developed countries and tweet entirely in english, with a smattering of foreign words here and there.

in the end your analytics and referral data should be more than enough to answer any questions of effectiveness you might have.

Raven tools (and soon SEOmoz) has some potent Social Tracking / Social Mention features, maybe take a look at those as well.

I agree 100% with what Theo is saying. The use of CSS to replace images has gotten to a point (from a purely aesthetic standpoint) that you cant tell the difference anymore. It is effective and considered best practice to use text when possible. It compounds your pages SEO weight and can edge out your competition if they are using images as opposed to CSS to render text in its place. Style Sheets RULE!