General Productivity and Organization

• Dropbox for sharing documents between multiple computers and sharing large files with other people. It’s on both my personal and company laptops, plus my iPhone. Dropbox has become my default location for storing any file that I want available to me wherever I am. I’m using almost 90 percent of the capacity in my free 2GB account, so there is a pretty good chance I’ll upgrade to the paid version this year. (Though if you click-through the link here, sign-up for an account and download the software, I’ll get 250MB added to my account, so I’d very much appreciate you doing that.
• Evernote, for notes, travel information, reference information and lists — including my to-do lists. I use this every day as a key part of my task management and project management tracking system, and have basically stopped using paper. This is part of my effort to have less stuff and less clutter this. Just like Dropbox, I have Evernote on both my laptops plus my iPhone. I’m using the free version, for the moment.
• Basecamp for project management at work. We’ve been using this for over a year now at work, and although it’s not perfect, it still seems to have the right mix of just-enough features without too much complexity.
• LastPass for password management. I think it’s almost essential to have some safe, secure, always available way to manage passwords. I have a little home-brew system for generating and remembering unique passwords, but even that isn’t enough for the dozens of different passwords I need to keep track of. LastPass helps keep me sane.

• Scrivener for writing. I save the files in Dropbox and have it installed on both my machines. I love the writing interface as well as its ability to handle complex, multi-part documents – everything from blog posts to my daily journal to novels. I wrote the first draft of this post in Scrivener. It’s a Mac-only app, so Windows folks are out of luck (or perhaps there’s an alternative – I just don’t know).
• Xmind for mind mapping. I’ve found mind mapping an excellent tool for organizing thoughts and ideas, and translating the results of brainstorming to a coherent structure. I should be using it at work with our teams as a brainstorming tool. I would just hook the laptop up to a projector so everyone can see the mind map as it’s built. This comes in both free and paid versions, but I’ve only used the free version.

• I continue to be a huge fan of Hootsuite for social media management, especially Twitter. It’s a web app, so it’s available at any computer with an Internet connection, and there’s an iOS version as well for the iPhone and iPad. I get the same set of lists, searches and other features no matter where I log in from. Plus Hootsuite has built in analytics, scheduling and other capabilities. The free version has quite  a robust set of features, and the quality is so good I wouldn’t hesitate to pay for the premium version if (more likely when) I need the extra features.

Of course, like most people I use Microsoft Office for word processing, presentations, spreadsheets, email, contacts and calendars. And there’s a range of other applications and tools I’m in and out of each day. But the ones above are really my go-to apps for getting things done. If you have any must-have applications, I’d love to hear about them. Please leave a comment below.

There are lots of freebies available for bloggers and other online types. (Photo by Jenny Rollo - http://www.sxc.hu/photo/975867)

2. Free phone number with voice mail and other features, from Google Voice. Unfortunately this is still in beta, and you have to request an invite, which may not come soon. They don’t seem to be allowing uses to give away invites, at least yet, judging from the fact that I don’t have any to give away in my account. Another option is Simple VoiceBox.

3. Free blogging software — WordPress. Of course.

4. Free photos: Flickr and stock.xchng are two sites where you can find photos that you can use online for free. You normally have to credit the photo, of course, and respect the creator’s wishes as far as how it’s used (commercial, noncommercial, etc.).

5. Free FTP software, for uploading and downloading sites to and from your site — Filezilla (you want the client version, not the server version).

6. Free photo and image editing, online. Pixlr.com is a web app that allows you to edit photos and other images the same way you would with a lightweight desktop program, such as Photoshop Elements. You won’t get all the features you get in a desktop app, but Pixlr.com is still quick, easy and free. (Note, if you’re using open source images from Flickr or stock.xchng, it’s generally OK to resize them for the web, but the terms of service frequently prohibit major changes, such as turning a color photo black and white or otherwise altering the image.)

7. Free CSS and HTML debugging utility. If you want to get your hands dirty and write or edit code for your site, Firebug is a great Firefox browser plug-in that can help.

8. Free email, calendar, file sharing and web site creation. Google Apps Standard Edition brings Google’s apps (such as Gmail and the Google Calendar) to your domain, backed by Google’s robust server farms.

9. Free conference calls. FreeConferenceCall.com offers a free conference call service that allows you to have conference calls. The company even offers free recording, so you could use it, for example, to record a podcast. In case you’re wondering, this company makes its money by upselling customers to offerings with more features.

10. Free advice. There’s a lot of information and advice out there, of course. Not all of it’s good. But among those I really like are Darren Rowse’s Problogger.net, Brian Clark’s Copyblogger.com and DavidRisley.com.

There’s lots more free stuff, and free advice, on the Web. What are some your favorite freebies? Please share them in the comments.

Related posts:

• Four easy tips for making your business card and email signature more social

• Guy Kawasaki has a good, but somewhat controversial post, about “How to use Twitter as a twool.”
• If you have a blog or other content site, and you’re using an email newsletter as part of your outreach, Problogger Darren Rowse has some great ideas about how to use your email newsletter and an autoresponder to drive even more traffic to your web site.
• Think social media is just for big brands with big budgets or dot-come type companies? Think again. A pest control company has adopted social media strategies as a significant, long-term component to its marketing.
• The New York Times asks if new data mining technologies will track us across the Internet and through our mobile communications and ultimately erode our privacy. Might notions about privacy be redefined for the next generation?
• Amazon tries “user-generated public relations.” Is this really new, or just old-school PR techniques applied online?
• ReadWriteWeb says we should stop using TinyURL on microblogging services such as Twitter. I agree – I’m using snipr.com.

Related posts:

• How to get people (or at least me) to follow you back on Twitter
• Five tips for better tweeting
• Eight links on marketing, social media, blogging and more
• What I learned experimenting with automated tweets
• Eight tips for writing shorter tweets

In his email to that list yesterday, Calacanis explained why he is retiring from blogging.

One hundred of you responded with amazing suggestions to my email last night. After that I realized that blogging is not longer the medium for me–email is. 100 amazing suggestions in 12 hours from a pool of around 500 email subscribers. That’s 20% response rate with really considered words and no drama.

This is really interesting (and it’s not April 1, so I assume this isn’t some kind of hoax or prank, though you never know). Calacanis was co-founder of Weblogsinc.com, one of the first big commercial blog networks. It was sold to AOL in October 2005 for a reported $25 million or so. So Calacanis is someone who really knows blogging and has been doing it for a long time.

You can still a lot of his online movements, of course. In addition to the email newsletter, there’s his Twitter stream, his photos on Flickr, and more in the right sidebar of his blog.

Update: Scoble says Calacanis is playing us. Could be right.

Related posts:

• Is email the new blogging?