Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

This mind map from Robin Good has to be the best this week  listing free or minimal cost online collaboration tools. Feel free to add missing tools (or contact Robin directly).

This week I have a few selected items from Amit over at Digital Inspiration.

• How to Make a Twitter Background Image with PowerPoint or Keynote
• How to Carry Your Google Reader Offline with Scoop, Supports Synchronization
• Scandoo allows you to check your website for potential misuse in comments etc by spammers. Simply type in your domain name using the site: identifier – e.g. site:spyjournal.biz.

Mostly Lisa has a photography contest – vote for your favourite photo on this page

Dana Coffey has a very good netiquette article – I fully agree with the Facebook application thing!

Xobni (an Outlook plug in I couldn’t live without now) has upgraded and has some cool new features. Their blog post is titled Xobni brings the internet into Outlook…4 ways your Outlook will never be the same. Includes integration with Facebook, LinkedIn, Hoovers and Yahoo Mail.

The Windows Live Photo and Video Blog has a nice easy all in one place list of plugins for the betas of Live Photo Gallery and Live Movie Maker including Facebook, YouTube, SmugMug, Flickr, Picasa and Drupal.

I installed Expression Blend and am going to use it to try and produce some Silverlight content if I can. I found this site to be a good source of video training for Expression Blend, and the other Expression web products. Microsoft also has a Learning Snacks page with helpful videos about Silverlight.

So I am now using Xobni - the new email revolution software.

I have some invites - who wants them - comments please. (

Xobni is the Outlook plug-in that helps you organize your flooded inbox.

Comments from their website:

Sidebar View of Past Conversations & Attachments

Don't waste time hunting for information buried in email - everything is right there in the sidebar.

Lightning Fast Email Search

Locate lost attachments, contacts, conversations and more with search that responds as you type.

"Bill Gates called Xobni the next generation of
social networking."

Windows Live Writer is a desktop application that makes it easy to publish content to your blog.The software is intuitive and powerful, but, every now and then, there is something that it can't do or could be done in a better way. Overtime though developers have provided several solutions to these problems. Sarah from Microsoft's Channel 10 has written a great article introducing ten plugins for Windows Live Writer. The ten plugins she thinks are the must haves for bloggers:

1. Digg This Plugin for Live Writer:
The Digg This plugin inserts a "Digg This" button to your Windows Live Writer posts and provides seamless integration with Digg.