I’ve been using the chat client Digsby for a while now, and it’s pretty awesome. It’s comparatively new (less than a year), but quite stable, feature complete, and adds a bunch of new features that simplify things substantially.

• Cleanly integrates with all the traditional instant messenging systems, adding gtalk, facebook chat, and twitter.
• Integrates mail and event notifications from almost any mail source, as well as facebook and myspace’s event feeds
• Free!
• Almost cross platform - the initial release is Windows only, but they’re releasing OS X and Linux versions soon
• Lets you neatly merge multiple accounts on different services belonging to the same person. Then, just tells you if they’re online on any service, and intelligently uses that one to communicate with them.

Given the proliferation of social networks and messaging networks, it’s quite nice to have one tool that bridges them. I don’t have to deal with the fact that not everyone uses the same tools - Digsby gives me a list of everyone, and when I want to talk with them, it just works.

I love tools that hide complexity without being simplistic.

If you’re in the business of writing and delivering presentations and you think that there might be people out there interested in seeing them, I heartily recommend SlideShare.

It’s simple - make an account, fill out your profile, then upload presentations as PowerPoint files or PDFs. Then they’re viewable in your browser using their flash widget. You can restrict who has access to slides, or make them public. There’s even a full screen presentation mode; in principle, you could substitute it for actually hauling copies of your presentations around with you - just bring them up in the browser..

Anyway, I’ve chucked up a bunch of old presentations from my Masters. Later I’ll upload some more recent works including the lecture slides for Educ122. All available at http://www.slideshare.net/xorgnz

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