In a departure from the typical posts here on O-where, I wanted to heap praise on some excellent free applications and utilities that make my navigation and weaving of the wild world of the web more efficient and fun.
Delicious: bookmarking service (by Yahoo) that allows you to save and manage bookmarks on a central site, which are then accessible from most any internet device using any browser via a secured login. You can tag, comment, and group your bookmarks, which are fully searchable. You can make each bookmark public for sharing, or private. Simple, quick, indispensible. Delicious has become my home page, whether at home, at work, or mobile.
Evernote: A site for creating and organizing notes, storing snippets from web pages, images, documents, scans, handwriting, you name it. Great for research, to-do lists, brainstorming,journaling, work-in-progress, etc. I use it to store scans of Tarot cards that I can then access and meditate on or journal on. Accessible from the internet, computer, or mobile. Another simple, quick, flexible tool.
Feedly: a companion to the Google Reader feed reader, in the form of an extension for Google Chrome or Firefox browsers. Provides a modern inviting alternative to the spartan Google Reader interface, with a customizable magazine-like graphic presentation. Feedly makes reading blog feeds fun, not a chore.
Lazyfeed: Lazyfeed scans the blogoverse for the topics you specify, and presents a real-time “conveyor belt” of blog entries for those topics, in an inviting click-me tiled interface. Great for researching new topics and products, and discovering interesting blogs.
Readability: a browser bookmarklet that reformats web pages by stripping out graphics and leaving only the essential text, similar to the “Print this page” feature of many sites. You can specify font style, size, and margins. Great for sites with small fonts and lots of graphics and ads. Also check out their TBuzz bookmarklet for sending web pages to Twitter.
Sobees: a social networking aggregator, providing a consolidated interface for reading and sending updates in Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn, and/or MySpace. Allows you to add filters to include or exclude specific words from the social streams, handy for filtering out those pesky Facebook app update messages. There is a Sobees Lite desktop client, and a similar Sobees Web interface.
I hope you find one or more those apps useful in the webs you weave.
O-where 