Fallen Into Knowledge

Wordpress: Wordpress is free. Wordpress is blogging software - this blog runs on Wordpress. Many others do to: The New York Times’ blogs do, as do the Wall Street Journal’s blogs and Willamette Week’s blog, so does Stephen Colbert’s blog. So: Wordpress is free and robust enough to handle massive amounts of traffic. Its also easy to use, and easy to customize. Oh, and its also open source, so you can feel good about using it.

del.icio.us: del.icio.us is a service for storing your web bookmarks online. The advantages are plenti-fold (yes, I made that word up): 1. your bookmarks are searchable using keywords, this becomes more helpful as we amass more and more bookmarks. 2. your bookmarks are accessible on any computer, because they are not stored on your computer, but on the web. and, 3. your bookmarks are public, you can see your friends’ bookmarks, and they can see yours. My bookmarks are here, or you can see my most recent bookmarks listed in this site’s sidebar.

Google Analytics: If you have a website (and most of my visitors do), then you probably want to know how many people visit, where they come from, and what they are interested in seeing when they visit. There are many “site statistics” solutions that give you that information - I think Google’s is better. And, as with most things, there is a plug-in for Wordpress sites.

Twitter: Another “social web service” - heavy on the social. Here’s the gist of it: Sign up and create a few ways to let Twitter know what you are doing - via SMS, IM, or the web (or use Twitterific on the Mac) - the updates are limited to 160 characters, which encourages (requires) brief messages. Then, subscribe to your friend’s feeds. Here’s mine. Twitter is my best guess for the “next big web phenomena.”

Flickr: Chances are, you’ve heard of Flickr, but I’ve got to get to Five and Flickr is still very cool If you haven’t, get with the program. Perhaps under-realized are the many ways in which Flickr’s database and services can be accessed without going through the website: Uploading tools (even for Aperture!), RSS feeds, and widgets galore!

Growl / Quicksilver: I know, these are the sixth and seventh items, but until now I’ve only listed items than can by used by anybody - these are Mac only. Still, they are free. If you use a Mac, you owe it to yourself to check these out. Neither one is easily explainable, and both do seemingly mundane things - Growl is a notification system, quicksilver is an application launcher, but in both cases they do so much more.

What else should be added to this list?