This is an arbitrary list. These are what I basically use/rely on and what I recommend when my students ask. I intend to develop the list and of course all recommendations and comments are welcome:)
1. A blogging software: Blogger or WordPress.com Nowadays, I prefer WordPress. Inbuilt statistics, better templates…
2. A Gmail account. Gmail. All Google Applications require a Gmail account. I wonder why you don’t have one already…
3. Google Docs. It is a great tool to produce collaborative work. It has also Forms to creating surveys..
4. Open Office. In case you are pissed off with Microsoft Office. You can download this Office software which is free. Not as good as Microsoft Office yet but it is still satisfactory. Well, I have written my dissertation by using Google Docs and Open Office programs…
5. Bibme. A free, simple place to create your bibliographies in several Biblio formats. Honestly, I used this to create my bibliography for my dissertation.
6. Paint.Net. A free image editor. That’s the one I use constantly. Some recommend GIMP but I haven’t tested that at all. Let me know if you recommend, too.
7. InfraRecorder. An open source cd burner. That’s what I use for my CDs I listen to when I drive:)
8. For file storage and sharing, in addition to Google Docs, I use Box.net. For a better sharing, I feel like Scribd becomes a better place though…
9. Google Reader. An excellent tool to follow blogs and sites through RSS feeds. I follow more than 400 at the moment and Reader is just great…
10. Tweet Deck. Saved my life. I could not figure out how to use Tweeter more effectively and now I am getting used to Twitter usage:)
11. For microblogging: Twitter and Friendfeed. In Turkey Friendfeed is more popular at the moment. People share great stuff and this becomes a more important source for my blog posts… Friendfeed has some applications so that I can automatically announce my blog posts, youtube activities, last.fm likes at twitter…
12. Youtube. There are many rivals but I still use Youtube. More and more liking its Recommendations… And of course for video hosting it is still a great place…
13. Speaking of recommendations, LastFm is a great music place to find new good musical stuff. Not for downloading but exploration…
14. Speaking of recommendations, Amazon, my beloved, has also great recommendation services based on what you have, what you bought and what you rated.. in books, music, and movies.
15. Speaking of movies, can there be a rival to IMDB, best film database?
16. For music downloads/sharinng. I totally rely on SoulSeek.
17. For a region free open source DVD player software, I use VLC Media Player.
18. For a music player, WinAmp has always been my favorite.
19. In order to bypass Web Censorship in Turkey I rely on Open DNS which worked fine so far… So that I can use YouTube and many hmmm other sites…
20. For free ebook downloads. I start with Aaaarg and PDF Search Engine.
21. For time management, I test Rescue Timeat the moment. Seems cool but I have no final decision yet.
22. In addition to networking, I use Facebook for sharing links and storing my photos online. I could never like much Picasa or Flickr. But these are huge photo storage and sharing places out there… In case you need…
23. In case you want to read some stuff later then here you have InstaPaper. There is a bookmarklet so that when you surf, you can easily mark stuff to read later. Well, so far I bookmarked a lot and did not go back to read but they are there waiting for me:)
24. Do I have to mention Wikipedia. A basic source of knowledge and good to give links to when you write about some stuff your readers may not know…
25. Best social bookmarking site: Delicious.
26. Still testing: Mendeley. Seems to be a great bibliography tool you download and sync with your online profile. Glue. A recommendation service with a pluging to your Firefox.
27. Speaking of Firefox, well my favorite browser. I tried Flock, Chrome and I hate IExplorer and I ended up continuing to use Firefox…
28. For wiki-based work, I use from time to time Wikispaces.
29. Doodle. For event organizations. Decision making about time especially. I used once, it worked fine…
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This is great. Thanks so much for taking the time to write all this out.
You should also try SSuite Office for a free office suite. They have a whole range of office suites that are free for download.
Their software also don’t need to run on Java or .NET, like so many open source office suites, so it makes their software very small and efficient.
You may try these links:
http://www.ssuitesoft.com/index.htm
or
http://www.ssuitesoft.com/ssuiteexcalibur.htm
or
http://ssuite5element.webs.com/thefifthelement.htm
Vanka, thank you for sharing these!
Thanks for this list – I’ve found it very useful and appreciate you taking the time to compile it. I wonder why you don’t use Zotero or diigo, though? Zotero is a free bibliographic tool that operates within your browser and just announced 10g of cloud space to store your pdf files. I find diigo a more comprehensive social bookmarking tool than delicious – just because it will send your bookmarks to your delicious as you file them into diigo. It also has great highlighting and comment features which I’ve found lacking in delicious (although maybe delicious has updated since I switched to diigo?)
Anyway, thanks again for the list!
Dear mktheberbe, thank you so much for sharing. It is probably my problem in Zotero. I installed its extention to Firefox twice but I could not use it productively. Many knowledgeable people recommend, so it has to be good. I will give it another try. I have to admit I never heard diigo before. Not its in my to do list. I will have a look! Thanks again.
I find Slideshare useful to access presentations
http://www.slideshare.net/
Never uploaded anything to it, but seems quite straight forward.
For sourcing feee stock photos, there is Morgue file
Just make sure you use the free photos section.
http://www.morguefile.com/archive/