OStatic

For years, I've been looking for a serious online research tool that would let me not just add to the ratnest of bookmarks and favorites I have, but really control, annotate, correlate, tag and source online material. Last week, as I was gearing up to join WWD, I found an awesomely deep, free, open source and innovative tool in the form of a super-stable FireFox 2.0 extension: Zotero.

Earlier today IBM (IBM) threw its weight behind the Open Office project, a move that will give the open source productivity suite some much needed support in the enterprises. And if that wasn't enough, now Google (GOOG) has upped the ante on Microsoft Office by teaming up with consulting company, Cap Gemini.

There are times when all we need to do is write. Really crank out the text. (For me, that's most of the day.) We don't need distractions and we don't need a bloated, expensive word processor with way too many features and way too slow a load time (I'm looking at you, Microsoft Word).

What we need is a minimalist, distraction-free word processor - and being the cheapskates that we are, we want it free.

Google is looking to help web applications get offline, releasing a new Gears open source project. At a demonstration, today it is releasing a version of Google Reader that works offline via a manual sync.

How many ways are there to manage your task list? Almost as many as there are people with tasks to do. Here are 20 different ways of tracking your to dos, with examples of each.

You probably use more than one of these options, depending on what you're trying to manage and what suits your temperament. Or maybe you have some other ideas. If so, share them here.