101 Fantastic Freebies

Office Productivity Software & Services
WINNER Zoho (www.zoho.com) What makes Zoho the winner is that it doesn’t merely try to copy Microsoft Office functionality. It’s web-based, so you can collaborate with others on your documents, for example. But the functionality of even the base software beats Microsoft’s offering in some areas; for creating HTML and graphics-heavy documents, for instance, it surpasses Word. This is the best and most comprehensive web-based office suite you can find. Included are a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation program, and a database builder – and plenty of other productivity applications are being added all the time.
Google Docs and Spreadsheets (docs.google.com) Like Zoho, the web-based Google Docs and Spreadsheets lets you work with others as well as create and edit documents and spreadsheets. Its collaboration features are particularly noteworthy, and it uses Google’s search to make finding any document fast.
Num Sum (www.numsum.com) While Num Sum includes all of the features you would expect it to have, it’s also a social-networking site where you can share spreadsheets with like-minded others. It’s a great setup for anyone who’s interested in sharing spreadsheets to track home maintenance, a workout schedule, or a Rugby Sevens pool, for example.
Ajax 13 (www.ajax13.com) This web suite has more features than competitors like Zoho, including everything from a word processor to a drawing program, a spreadsheet, a presentation app, and even a digital music player.
OpenOffice.org (www.openoffice.org) Not happy with the idea of a web-based office application? Then you want the downloadable OpenOffice.org, the free competitor to Microsoft Office. A complete suite, it provides a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation program, a database – and, for übergeeks, a “mathematical function calculator” (if you have to ask what it is, you don’t need it).

Time Management
WINNER Backpack (www.backpackit.com) Juggling multiple projects has never been so easy. For every project you create a separate page, each of which can include to-do lists, freeform text, notes, links, files, images and reminders.
Backpack also has a calendar, and if you use Apple iCal, Mozilla Calendar or any program that supports the iCalendar format, your reminders will be automatically added to your Backpack calendar. You can even have reminders sent to you via email or to your cell phone.
Google Notebook (www.google.com/note
book) If you need a simple way to save clippings from the web, organise them and then search through them, look no further than Google Notebook.
Sticky Notes (www.sticky-notes.net) This downloadable program does exactly what its name says: it allows you to create virtual sticky reminder notes that you place right on your computer’s desktop.
Easy To-Do (www.xanadutools.com) With this small, simple download, you can quickly create and track to-do lists.

Registry Cleaner
WINNER TweakNow RegCleaner Standard (www.tweaknow.com/RegCleaner.html) The Registry is a scary place; like Dante’s underworld, it should have a sign reading “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here”. TweakNow RegCleaner Standard is your virtual Virgil, a guide into the depths of the Registry. It automatically scans your Registry and reveals problems. After you examine the changes and tell the software to do its magic, it cleans the Registry for you.
Clean My Registry (www.smartpctools.com/clean_registry) This Registry cleaner will not show you quite as much information as TweakNow does, but it is fast and it does a good job of sweeping away the junk.

Hardware Utility
WINNER Belarc Advisor (www.belarc.com/free_download.html) If you’re looking for an exquisitely detailed audit of your hardware, this is the download you need. The program starts with the basics, such as the computer manufacturer, installed RAM, hard-disk size, and processor type and speed. But it also shows you the motherboard maker, hard-disk manufacturer, chassis serial number, PC service tag, bus type and speed, multimedia devices... the list goes on and on.
SpeedFan (www.almico.com/speedfan.php) This must-download for serious overclockers touts itself as a monitor for your system’s temperature and fan speed. The real reason it’s worthwhile is that it lets you easily overclock your PC and adjust the fan speed so it doesn’t overheat.
M2 Information (msquaredtechnologies.com/m2info) This program performs a quick scan of your computer and lists details such as the processor type and speed, the RAM amount and disk information.

Personal web
WINNER Pageflakes (www.pageflakes.com) Home pages are passe – what you really want is a webtop, a personal web space you can customise with news feeds, chat tools, weather info, and plenty more. With Pageflakes you build your custom webtop from a collection of components, including RSS feeds and news, plus direct feeds from Flickr, YouTube and similar sites. You also get tools such as an address book, notepad and clock, and you can even have a widget that lets you read your web-based email messages. And in the downtimes, you can try a game of poker or a Sudoku puzzle.
Netvibes (www.netvibes.com) With dozens of feeds, news sources and widgets to choose from, you’ll find it easy to build the exact web home you want.
NZ City (home.nzcity.co.nz) PC World reader panellist Alan Saks recommends the NZ City personal start page as one of the most useful local sites – and he’s not alone. The popular, 100% Kiwi home page isn’t as aesthetically pleasing as some, but it has local knowledge firmly in its favour. Optional feeds include weather forecasts for 40 towns, weekly Lotto results, news from all the major regional papers and share tracking on the NZSE.
Protopage (www.protopage.com) This site is more for play than work, with plenty of cartoons, podcasts, video feeds and widgets. But if you must get something done, it has productivity tools as well.
Google Personalised Home (www.google.com/ig) For fans of minimalism, this clean-looking webtop is mainly all text, but it has an array of feeds and tools.
Windows Live (www.live.com) Though Microsoft’s webtop is buttoned-down and corporate-looking, it offers lots of customisable content, plus access to your Windows Live Mail or Hotmail account.

Blogging Site
WINNER Google Blogger (www.blogger.com) Blogger is home to tens of thousands of blogs, and with good reason. Because it’s template-driven, getting started is simple; posting is also a snap. But you have plenty of powerful tools here, as well, such as the ability to make RSS feeds yourself, and the ability to create posts merely by sending an email message containing the text.
WordPress (www.wordpress.com) Another worthy blogging competitor is WordPress.com, a site that’s brought to you by many of the same people who develop the open-source blogging software available at WordPress.org.
LiveJournal (www.livejournal.com) This blogging site is noteworthy for letting you create private “journals” that you can share with family and friends, and it includes easy-to-use community features for putting you in touch with other people who share your interests.
Microsoft Windows Live Spaces (spaces.live.com) Though this offering isn’t the most sophisticated of blogging sites, both setting up your blog and posting entries are simple – plus, a big community is there, just waiting to hear from you.
Vox (vox.com) Developed by SixApart, creators of the Moveable Type publishing platform, Vox is the blogging site to watch. Vox’s elegant blog templates, powerful social networking features and strong privacy controls appeal to a more mature crowd than many web communities.
First Page (www.evrsoft.com) If you’re up for the DIY approach to blog-building, or even a bit of template-tweaking, you can’t go past webpage editor First Page.
“While not quite up to the high standards of Dreamweaver, it’s far superior to Microsoft’s FrontPage,” says reader panelist John Van Dam. “First Page has a vast array of tools and support for a variety of client-side and server-side languages, and you can’t beat the fact it’s only a 10MB download and it’s free.”
Silverstripe (www.silver
stripe.com) The buzz about this home-grown, open-source content management system is growing. It’s the first New Zealand organisation to be chosen for the Google Summer of Code; with ten international programming students working on Silverstripe projects, expect frequent refinements to the PHP-based distribution in coming months.

Online RSS Reader
WINNER Bloglines (www.bloglines.com) The web-based Bloglines loads quickly, sports a sophisticated interface, and delivers such snappy responses that you’d almost think you were using downloadable software. Bloglines makes subscribing to and reading feeds easy, as well. We’re particularly fond of the Clippings feature, which allows you to add any blog or web page text to a special Clippings tab; that way, you can keep all of your important posts in a single location for easy retrieval. We also like Clip Blogs, which are clips from blogs that you can keep private or share with others.
NewsGator Online (www.newsgator.com) NewsGator Online comes a close second to Bloglines. We particularly like the way this offering delivers feeds in a clear, clutter-free display.
Google Reader (www.google.com/
reader/view) Google excels at many things, but simple web-based software interfaces is not necessarily one of them. Though this site does the job, non-techies might be confused by the arcane interface.

Software RSS Reader
WINNER Sage (sage.mozdev.org) What’s the best way to integrate RSS news feeds and the web? Don’t use a separate RSS reader. That’s the secret behind Sage, which integrates directly into Firefox (but not Internet Explorer). Using it is simple: click the Sage icon in your toolbar; Sage will then drop down on the left. Whenever you visit a page that has an RSS feed, you click the Discover Feeds button to add the feed. The rest of the Firefox window then becomes your reader. Sage lets you organise your folders, search through feeds, and import and export feeds lists.
Active Web Reader (www.deskshare.com/awr.aspx) If you’d prefer an Internet Explorer plug-in, this simple-to-use, downloadable reader is a fine choice. Active Web Reader lets you organise feeds by category, import and export groups of feeds, and search feeds.
Tristana RSS Reader (www.tristana.org/reader.cfm) Fans of Microsoft Outlook will like this reader: it mimics the overall Outlook interface, with folders on the left and a reading pane on the right that shows RSS topics. The program can download podcasts, too.
MCE RSS Reader (mcerssreader.oabsoftware.nl) Here’s an RSS reader with a difference: it downloads RSS feeds and then displays them on your Media Centre PC. Why would anyone want such a thing? Some RSS feeds now include videocasts (sometimes called vodcasts), but Windows Media Centre unfortunately has a problem handling certain video formats; this tool, though, can deal with them all.

Web Video Site
WINNER YouTube (www.youtube.com) No need for a drum roll here: YouTube wins this one, hands down. It has the biggest collection of videos, it’s easy to search, it’s well organised, the video streams quickly and smoothly, uploading your own videos is easy... what else do you want?
Blinkx (www.blinkx.com) Rather than being a video site, Blinkx is a search engine that trolls selected sites for videos. It has partnerships with more than 100 content and media companies, so you’ll find lots of video from leading news sites.
Yahoo Video (video.yahoo.com) Here’s another ideal site for your serious video-watching habit. The stripped-down interface will please fans of simplicity.
Google Video (video.google.com) Even though Google bought YouTube, it continues to run this site too, offering plenty of videos. Oddly enough, when we last checked, videos from Comedy Central shows were still here, even though they had been removed from YouTube. That may not be the case by the time you read this.

Notepad Replacement
WINNER NoteTab Light (www.notetab.com) This utility improves on Windows’ Notepad in so many ways, it’s hard to count them. Start with the basics: you can open multiple files, not just one, as you must in Notepad. Each file runs in its own tab, so switching between them is easy. The program comes with all kinds of nifty built-in tools, too, such as a feature that strips HTML out of a document, a Paste Board that saves text clips automatically, macros and plenty more.
Crimson Editor (www. crimsoneditor.com) Do you need a geeked-out Notepad replacement? Look no further. This text editor for programmers includes syntax highlighting for HTML, C/C++, Perl and Java.
EditPad Lite (www.editpadpro.com/editpadlite.html) This text editor opens multiple files (each in its own tab), opens files of any size, and allows you unlimited undo and redo – in other words, it has everything that Notepad doesn’t.

Multimedia Tools and Toys
WINNER Audacity (audacity.sourceforge.net) If you want to create media, not just consume it, try this program, which includes audio recording tools and sophisticated editing functions. You can even create audio soundscapes from scratch. You can add any of several dozen effects, use a sound mixer... in short, the app has everything you need. While you don’t have to be well-versed in sound editing to use it, people with some experience will particularly enjoy its power.
Free iPod Video Converter (www.jodix.com) This tool does precisely what it says: it converts videos from a variety of formats so you can watch them on your iPod’s screen.
PSP Video 9 (psp video9.com) Sony’s PlayStation Portable handheld makes a terrific video player. The PSP Video 9 program converts PC video files (.avi, .mpg, DivX, etc) into PSP video format for playback.
DVD Shrink (www.dvdshrink.org) If you have ever attempted to make a backup copy of a DVD movie to a DVD-R, you’ve probably discovered that you can’t do it because DVD movie discs are dual-layer and have more data than can fit on a recordable disc. DVD Shrink solves the problem by compressing the DVD data, letting you make the copy fit on a DVD.

Business Productivity
WINNER Google Apps for Your Domain(www.google.com/a/) If you’re running a small business, why pay for collaboration software when this site can give you a lot of what you need for free?
Google Apps offers group calendaring, portals for each employee, and Gmail accounts for everyone using your business domain, and a simple web page creator for building and managing your site. Google also has Google Apps Premier Edition, a for-pay version with extra features for large companies; but Google says it will continue to offer Google Apps for Your Domain to small companies for free.
Microsoft Office Live (officelive.microsoft.com) Don’t be confused by this site’s name – the service it offers has nothing to do with the Microsoft Office suite. Though it provides much of what Google Apps for Your Domain does, it’s not as well integrated. Office Live storage can hold up to 500MB of data and email management for up to 25 accounts with 2GB of storage each. It does give you free domain registration and a better web page editor than Google’s, however.
FreeCRM.com (www.freecrm.com) If managing sales teams and contacts is all you’re after, this site will do the trick. It includes a free document repository of 10MB for your staff, as well.

A Rose by any other name One month after graduating from film school, one-time Mount Maunganui teenager Jessica Lee Rose reluctantly accepted an unpaid acting job. She agreed to star in a no-budget series of short video clips that would be released online, in the hopes of convincing studio execs to make the series into a feature film. That was in May 2006. Over the next three months, Rose filmed 30 episodes. They were viewed an incredible 3 million times. By October 2006, Rose was the face of an anti-poverty ad campaign for the United Nations. In December, she was the cover story for Wired magazine. In January, Forbes magazine named the 19-year-old the biggest celebrity on the internet: “Rose put a pretty face on a breaking phenomenon – that internet-based entertainment -- provides an intensely powerful incubator for new stars.” This month, on 4 June, Rose is to receive the Best Actress award at the inaugural Webby Film and Video Awards. The Webby Awards blurb says Rose “defined the role of the -internet celebrity”, and is “an integral founder of the new form of entertainment”. To top it all off, the Kiwi ingenue now has two feature films in post-production: a supporting role in Lindsay Lohan’s latest, --I Know Who Killed Me, and a starring role in drama Perfect Sport. The character that started it all is, of course, lonelygirl15 (‘real’-name Bree) – a geeky, naïve teenage girl experimenting with video-blogging. Her three-minute webcam clips were uploaded to YouTube two or three times a week. The website sub-sequently sold for US$1.65 billion – partly on the back of built-for-the-medium content like lonelygirl15, the second-most-subscribed-to channel on YouTube. Lonelygirl15 itself now takes in over US$10,000 a month in paid advertising. Bree’s pretty, quirky face, confessions about her relationship with best friend Daniel, and speculation surrounding her background and religion rapidly drew an audience of around 500,000 viewers per episode. Most viewers believed Bree was like any other teenager with a webcam; some began to suspect that the editing was just a little too professional, the episodes just a little too dramatic to be believable. A regular viewer-turned-sceptic, Matthew Foremski, struck internet gold in September 2006 when he found a Google cache of the real-life Rose’s deleted MySpace page. The 18-year-old posted the link to his techno-logy journalist father’s blog (SiliconValley Watcher.com); both the Los Angeles Times and New York Times ran the story the -following day. The media went mad, decrying lonelygirl15 a fake and a hoax. Her fans, meanwhile, weren’t really bothered. Lonelygirl15’s mostly young -audience is comfortable with reality TV and the alternate reality of the web. “It is like stopping in the middle of Shortland Street and saying ‘Hey guys, just want to let you know what my real name is’,” Rose told the Herald on Sunday last year. “It wouldn’t be quite as entertaining.” Annabel McAleer