I thought I’d share a simple list of some of my favourite freeware, stuff I use all the time and really wouldn’t like to live without. This isn’t the full list by any means but here goes:
Utilities:
- Google Chrome
! – fast and cool browser - Firefox – for all of the extensions
- AGV - anti-virus software
- Spybot - to erradicate spyware
- Ad-aware – to erradicate nasty ad stuff
- Filezilla - FTP client
- Notepad ++ – better than notepad, has lots of features
- OpenOffice - free office software
- Freemind - for mind mapping
- Xobni - for finding stuff in Outlook
- Gmail of course
- CutePDF – for creating PDFs
- Google desktop search
- Latex - for writing my papers and PhD thesis, much much safer and better than word
- Google documents and calendar – easy and clean
- Jing - to share anything from my desktop or anywhere else super easily
- Blogger obviously
- Bloglines - it’s easy to use and looks tidy and neat
- Google bookmarks – for portable bookmarks
Natural language / A.I tools:
- OpenCyc - commonsense reasoning engine
- Ted pedersons tools (SenseClusters, wordnet::similarity, SenseRelate, WSD & more)
- Protege - to build OWL ontotlogies and Java Kazuki classes
- WordNet - machine readable dictionary
- Brill tagger- for part-of-speech tagging
- UEALite - my own stemmer, stems to actual words
- Perl/python/java – programming languages
- TextStat - for concordance and text analysis
- Link grammar parser – for parsing grammar
- Stanford grammatical relationship parser – for graphical representations
- SPARQL - for querying RDF
- Stanford shared ontologies repository – for ontologies
- TinySvm – for using support vector machines
- FrameNet - wonderful corpus
- PropBank - another wonderful corpus
- GATE - for text engineering
- Lemur Toolkit – for indexing and retrieval
SEO tools – now there are many many lists of these already so this is a short one:
- SeoBook tools – loads of free and useful tools
- SeoQuake - firefox add-on, gives you info on pages you visit (I won’t list all the add-ons)
- Google insights – to check what’s going on
- Twitscoop – to see what’s hot
- Technorati - what’s hot in the blog world
- HowSocialble? – to check out where a site features on social networks
- Fiddler - for debugging
- Link Sleuth – to find broken links quickly
- SEO fight – just for a bit of fun!
- VideoSurf - to check for vids on all video sites at once – very cool
I’ll leave it there but there are so many more. I hope you’ve found some useful and fun things in this list to use and enjoy!
