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!

