OpenOffice – After using Word for years, I finally got fed up with how big and clunky it had become (like most Microsoft products). A friend suggested OpenOffice and I haven’t looked back. It’s basically a free alternative to the Microsoft Office suite.

Notepad – If you use Windows, you have Notepad. It’s a handy, no-frills text tool that’s fast and simple. I use it to record project notes and to-do lists. The files are tiny and, as far as I know, universal, so you can open them in nearly any writing program.

Feed43 (pronounced as “Feed For Free”) is an online service, a proxy between your news reader application and third-party web sites that don’t support RSS natively. It allows you to create your own news feeds in RSS format for any web site, i.e. monitor any web site using your favorite news reader.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a veteran teacher or a newbie just now taking college courses — finding new ways to get students engaged in the classroom is always a great thing. One way many teachers are reaching out is with the multitude of material found on the web, allowing them to turn everyday lessons into a multimedia experience. You can find a great amount of helpful material on these sites, including videos to augment your lessons, lectures to inspire students, documentaries to show them how things work, and loads of additional videos to help you become a better, smarter teacher.

There are hundreds of social networking sites where you can connect with people from around the world, some you never heard of. We’ve dug through out list of sites and have come up with fifteen worth noting:

For status updates, try ending with a question. In the example below, Best Buy generated 274 responses so far to their question about what feature your can’t live without on your phone.

Every day, however, thousands of people are releasing mobile versions of their websites and seeing greatly increased levels of traffic as a result. Unless you optimize your website for mobile phone users soon, you could be left behind by the competition. Creating a mobile-friendly version of your site sounds like a daunting task, but it couldn’t be easier to do. Using one of the excellent tools below, you’ll be able to build, host and launch your mobile site with absolutely no coding knowledge whatsoever.

YoutubeDroid.Com is a free YouTube to MP3, MP4, 3GP, FLV and AVI (DivX) Converter and allows you convert and download a YouTube Video to MP3, MP4, 3GP, FLV and AVI (DivX) file online. So you are able to watch/listen to your favorite YouTube tracks.

PHPanywhere is a new online service that’s changing the way people develop on the web. We enable users to develop and maintain their php/html projects online using any standard web browser.

IE NetRenderer allows you to check how a website is rendered by Internet Explorer 7, 6 or 5.5, as seen from a high speed datacenter located in Germany. Just type in a URL in the field above and try it out – it’s free!

Jumpchart is a website planning application that allows you to plan the navigation of your website by creating, dragging and dropping pages into the plan. You can also add text and formatting to pages and then export your CSS files and site map when you’re finished.