Web 2.0 is full of tools that make it easy for you to participate in the digital ecology, we can produce, distribute, collaborate and monitor with unprecedented ease and low-cost (or none). Here’s a list of my favorites. Recommendations are based on my direct experience and I’ll use the tool for at least three months before posting it. Feel free to send in suggestions.
Project Management
Zoho.com Good for complex projects. Not very intuitive UI. Even though they have a single-login for all their services, it is not very well integrated yet.
Basecamp Great for online projects (like websites) with super easy to use interface. Can’t assign to-dos to multiple people. Tends to treat project linearly and one-dimensional, it’s worth paying the upgrade for the space and flexibility.
Google Groups & Google Doc Great for doc collaboration. Little integration btw groups and docs. FREE.
PBwiki: out of all the wiki platforms I’ve used this provides the most flexibility and really nice and easy to use UI. The free service is great and it gives you a bit of space to upload files.
Mind Mapping
mindomo.com Better for project mgm with flexibility of graphics, allows collaboration and is very comprehensive, good for many types of maps. You’ll have to pay to get rid of the advertising. It is a little
slow on the zoom feature and navigating across the screen for big maps
bubbl.us Simple and easy to use, great for beginners. Not a lot of functionality, just “bubbles”.
Mindjet: Mind manager Beautiful and flexible software to create multimedia mind maps in many ways. It’s offline, no collaboration & it costs $$$$. UPDATE- New version allows collaboration, though it’s still a desktop solution.
Mindmeister.com Good online mindmapping for groups. It allows multi-user editing at the same time (I’ve tested this with 40 people in one room). But it’s sometimes buggy and the functionality is limited only a few font sizes and icons.
WEB ANALYTICS
blogpulse.com: My favorite new web 2.0 tool, you can track everything for blogs, people, videos, etc. Really gives you a good sense on what’s happening in the digital world today.
Quantcast.com: Provides demographic data and it has clear terminology. They hide a bit their ‘panel’ approach, but it’s interesting to start assciating traffic data with demographic profiles.
Alexa.com Industry standard. Not good for website below 100K reach. The terminology is a bit confusing, every time I’ve used this data I have to clarify the terms
Compete.com * Option to download an extension bar to track sites you visit. Detects stats at the domain level. Note that “People count” = unique visitor. Great tool for traffic analysis.
Omniture Industry standard, good for huge corporate sites with multiple user
Digimine (Revenue Science) Before Omniture it was a popular solution for web tracking, I found it complex and not user friendly. It required a lot of training and maintenance
Google Analytics: Easy to use and comprehensive solution for FREE! The most advanced settings you can set up filters to trac your drive-to-web efforts.
Feedburner: Uses google analytics capability, track clicks, subscribers, browsers, etc. It’s better than using your standard RSS feeder.
Multimedia PRODUCTION
Incompetech.com Good for searching for music under cc license. Great descriptions and it offers way more than just techno
istockphoto.com Can’t beat $1 quality stock photos
jumpcut.com Online Video editing tool (free). It’s a little slow. Once you’re video is up there you can’t guarantee someone else won’t mash it too.
Screencast $29 worth it for really nice screen recording software for mac
Vegas Movie Studio: PC alternative to Final Cut, this is an easy to use (except for some bizarre terminology) and very comprehensive video editing software. Starts at $60 for the basic version. The best thing is that is very light that won’t take up up much memory in your computer. We’ve run this in crappy old Dell computers and it’s never crashed!
Final Cut Express: (for Mac only) A light and cheaper (much cheaper) version of Final Cut Pro. Has everything you need to produce web videos with more pazzass than you can in iMovie.
Web Publishing
Wordpress.com You can host your blog here, it’s extremely easy to use and a good start for beginner bloggers. However, you can quickly outgrow it, the functionality is limited. It’s painful to change the CSS because it won’t show you the current source.
Wordpress.org: best web publishing platform. It’s open source so innovations come out all the time. And it’s no longer just blogs, you can have portfolios or full websites with e-commerce functionalities. Be prepared to invest significant time to set it up though, you may want to hire a professional firm to do it for you.
Sitemasher.com iWeb Web publishing for basic users. You can’t change the header.You can export your design into some heavy HTML and upload it to your own server
