Craigslist - Craigslist is a free, online classifieds service that’s localized by geography. Do you need to sell that old refrigerator this weekend? Put it on Craigslist. Users can post items they want to sell and get responses by telephone or e-mail from people who live around them. It cuts out the middleman and often results in quicker sales than you’d get with other services such as eBay or your local newspaper.

In addition to a free-for-all buyers-and-sellers market, there’s also a job board that’s populated by many employers who agree to pay the $75 per category to list their openings. There are also house and apartment listings, personal ads, and an active user forum where people can talk about whatever they want.

Etsy - Etsy is an online marketplace for buying and selling handmade goods. Users can create their own virtual shop fronts to sell almost anything they’d want. Etsy has an integrated search tool that lets anyone search the site for goods and services out of a centralized directory. Users can also get into the nitty-gritty and design the specific look and feel of their own shops.

The site is a wonderful place to find the kind of crafts or goods you’d find at a local market–items that are often overlooked or simply diluted in the avalanche of consumer products that make their way onto other classified and auction sites such as eBay. It’s also a great place for people to sell their stuff without having to buy a special domain, write code, or hire someone to build a Web site, and pay for the hosting.

Kayak - Kayak is like Google for travel sites. Its search engine scours the Web to help you find the cheapest deals on travel services around the world. It searches more than 140 travel sites and lets you sort and customize the data. You don’t actually purchase the tickets or hotel bookings through Kayak, it simply directs you to the purchase page.

Some of its most useful features are the Buzz and Fare Alert planning pages. Buzz shows you the cheapest deals as discovered by other Kayak users in their searches. These prices are aggregated from historical data and listed when you do a search from your city. The Fare Alert service will send you an e-mail when a trip from one city to another becomes available at a low price, letting you pick when you’re going to travel by the cheapest price.

Woot! - Woot is an online retailer of goods. Most of the items sold are electronics, although you never know what will be next. The site sells a new product every night at midnight Central time and will keep it available until the next night or until it sells out. Unsold goods are then later sold (usually at a discount) in what’s called a Woot-off, where the retailer continues to sell new or previously listed goods until they run out of stock, replacing it with other items. Woot offs are well known for ending with the notorious “bag of crap” which contains a random grouping of items that are undisclosed to the buyer until it arrives in the mail. Bags of crap have been known to randomly contain high value items such as big-screen TVs and popular electronics.

Besides its standard store, Woot has three other variants that use the same, or a similar sales model. Wine.woot.com sells a new selection of wine or alcoholic items each week, while Shirt.woot.com sells a new user-created T-shirt every day. Woot’s other site Sellout.woot.com is a partnership with Yahoo’s Shopping site, and usually sells the second string items from Woot.com.

Zillow - Zillow is an online house-buying service. Instead of having to go visit houses in person you can do so online, browsing by neighborhood and narrowing down what you’re looking for based on a variety of parameters. It’ll do some of the legwork for you by figuring out how your house stacks up against other houses in the area, including how much it is per square foot and how much other houses sold for that were in your area.

One of the neatest features, however, is the option to ask a question to the sellers or the real estate agents. You can do so without even having to register. In turn, the service has effectively created a very large directory of real estate agents whose entire properties can be browsed, including houses they’ve sold in the past.

Google Reader - Google Reader is a Web-based RSS feed reader. Users can subscribe to as many RSS feeds as they want, then browse them in a lean and simplistic two-pane story browser that feels a little bit like Gmail. RSS feeds give users a visually simplified version of Web content. In addition to photos and text, Google Reader will also display embedded video clips from several popular services.

In addition to reading stories yourself, you can share them with others. Google Reader gives users the option to create sharable feeds of subscribed stories, including the ones they mark as being interesting. In 2007, Google expanded the sharing feature by integrating your list of shared stories with buddies on Google’s IM network Google Talk.

Google Reader works on any browser; there are also versions for mobile phones, the iPhone, and the Nintendo Wii.

iGoogle - iGoogle is Google’s customizable start page. Users can add any number of gadgets to their page that can be custom-tailored to link up with all sorts of Web services and serve as mini applications or newsfeeds. One of the features that makes iGoogle especially neat is it can be customized with different themes that change by what time of day you’re looking at the page. Users can create their own themes that go into the same directory that houses the thousands of developer-created gadgets.

Last year, Google also launched the capability to create your own gadgets with no coding knowledge required. Users simply plug in the datafeed and customize the shape, size, and coloring–the service does the rest. There are seven gadget presets to choose from, and using the same technology, you’re able to customize many preexisting gadgets created by others to fit the look and feel of your iGoogle page.

Maxathon - Maxthon has been downloaded more than 140 million times and is one of the few browsers to have mouse gestures as a standard feature. Users can hold the right mouse button and use a variety of motions to emulate clicking navigation buttons. It’s also got a built-in RSS reader and a screen-capture utility. Its development started when the creator, fed up with the lack of customization in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, decided to make his own browser.

While Maxthon doesn’t show up as a major contender in most market share reports, it’s worth noting it’s the second-most popular browser in China and holds 30 percent of the market there as of late April 2008.

AmazonMP3 - Amazon’s MP3 store has had a banner year. The service sells DRM-free MP3s of entire musical albums, ripped at a very high bitrate and with digital copies of the cover art. The service offers over 2 million tracks that are available for sale individually or by the album. In order to download albums, users must install a small helper program that lets you download several tracks at the same time. It will also automatically take the tracks and add them to your iTunes and/or Windows Media Player libraries.

Because there’s no DRM, the files can be played on any portable media player, which has helped Amazon jump to within the top five music sellers worldwide. Also, starting in January, Amazon signed a deal with Sony BMG that gave the music store access to all four major record labels, bringing it up to spec with its competitor, Apple’s iTunes.

Last.FM - Last.fm is a music discovery and listening service owned by CBS Interactive. It’s got a wide range of tracks users can listen to and share with others. It also has a handy recommendation engine that will give you a list of artists it thinks you’ll like, based your personal favorites. Users can make their own playlists and even share them with friends using the service’s widget-making tool or Facebook application.

One of its more helpful services for music junkies is Scrobbling, which tracks the music you’re listening to on your computer and sends the information to Last.fm. From there, everyone can look at what you’ve been listening to, how often you’ve listened to it, and give it a go themselves. Users also can have their own blogs where they can write about and reference music they’re listening to, or just write about whatever they want.

In early 2008 Last.fm finally got licensed, full-length tracks to stream as part of a deal with all four of the major record labels. The tracks are supported by ads, although users are now also getting the added benefit of some of CBS’ 140-plus radio stations that shuffle up their catalogs.

Apple’s iTunes - iTunes is Apple’s software jukebox. It started out as a Mac-only app before making its way to Windows users in late 2003. The software will let you manage photos, videos, and music files on your computer, then sync them up with Apple’s array of portable media players.

People have mixed opinions of iTunes since it’s only been open to Apple branded devices like the iPod and iPhone instead of being open to many competing devices as a platform. Despite this, it was one of the first mainstream programs to offer Internet radio and CD-ripping free of charge in a time while other jukebox software providers were not.

One of the reasons it’s free is the inclusion of the iTunes Store, which lets users buy music, TV shows, audio books and movies, as well as subscribe and browse podcasts. This year, Apple unveiled the iTunes rental store, which forgoes the usual $10 purchase fees for films and lets users rent them for a limited period of time for about a third of the cost.

Gimpshop

Many people have heard about the open source program called GIMP. But many people have found it to confusing to get started with. So, several developers worked hard to created a friendly user interface, so that anyone would be able to work with the program. What they created was GimpShop.
Gimpshop is now a powerful Photoshop looking program that has far more features most people will ever need to use.

Grab this program and indulge your inner artist, or enhance your latest photograph.

More information about GimpShop

Inkscape

If you’re looking for a graphics program that lets you create illustrations and graphics, much like Freehand or Illustrator, then give Inkscape a whirl.

Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Supported SVG features include shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, patterns, and grouping. Inkscape also supports Creative Commons meta-data, node editing, layers, complex path operations, bitmap tracing, text-on-path, flowed text, direct XML editing, and more. It imports formats such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and others and exports PNG as well as multiple vector-based formats.

Inkscape’s main goal is to create a powerful and convenient drawing tool fully compliant with XML, SVG, and CSS standards. We also aim to maintain a thriving user and developer community by using open, community-oriented development

More information about Inkscape

Ok, I realize that many of you don’t want to go to jail for pirating software. So, I’ve put together a little list of great software that everyone can download for the amazing price of $$$FREE$$$.

The lead-off batter in this software lineup is one that I get asked about all the time. “Do I really have to pay for anti-virus… I only use the internet to download cool themes and backgrounds for my computer?” Run for the hills, its virus central waiting to happen. Have no fear, AVG Anti-Virus Free is here. The folks over at Grisoft make a great free version of their anti-virus program. So now you can rest easing knowing that AVG will be protecting your computer against viruses and hackers, this app works with both Windows Vista and earlier versions.

Another issue that many computer owners have is they install and uninstall lots of software. Over time this can cause some problems with the computer’s registry. Don’t worry, the team at Smart PC Solutions have released a free Registry cleaner that will make your life so much easier. Regular use of a computer makes the registry fragmented and cluttered with obsolete and invalid data. But no longer with this great tool.

I’m also asked about what I use for email. I always recommend the best email program…GMAIL. But… since this is a list about free software you can download, its hard to do better than Thunderbird. Download this great email client and begin to reclaim your inbox.

In terms of Instant Messangers… I like to use an online tool that keeps my desktop uncluttered. I’m talking about Meebo. But if you’re looking for good downloadable messaging clients. There are tons: Skype, Gizmo, Yahoo Messanger, Google Talk, GAIM: connects to multiple types of IM, Trillian: connects to multiple types of IM. The real answer for instant messaging clients is, first figure out what clients your friends use, and then use that one.

I listen to music using iTunes. I edit photos using Google Picassa, trust me, it is a great piece of software. I edit some of my music files using Audacity. I burn CDs using the free CD Burner XP program. And I upload files to the internet using FileZilla.

In another post, I’ll spend some time talking about RSS readers and setting up a blog.

Are there other great free software products that I missed. Let me know by leaving a comment below.