shepherdweb.com

Does “Web Application” imply “Web 2.0″? Your guess is as good as mine. I might even be able to make an educated guess if I knew what Web 2.0 was! I’m going to make sure I attend a seminar or panel at SXSW Interactive with “Web 2.0″ in the title; hopefully someone there can clear this up for me.

These are online applications or tools that I use on a regular basis because they are useful and/or fun!

Backpack

This is one of the coolest tools ever made. I use this almost everyday to track personal goals, brainstorm, and progress. If you are not using Backpack yet, you are missing out!

Technorati

A great way to see who links to your blog, find information and opinions on a specific topic, and to network with fellow bloggers.

Mint

Mint is a traffic and statistics application. It is a little different than some of these other applications because it must be installed on your server with your website. I like it because you can set it to ignore your visits to the site you are tracking which gives you a more accurate picture of how much traffic you are getting. It also ignores spiders. My favorite thing about Mint is that statistics can be viewed in real time! There’s even a Dashboard Widget for you Mac users that provides a grand total, hourly total, or daily total depending on your selection…all in real time!

Blinksale

Blinksale makes it easy to create and send invoices, track payment, and even send a thank you note when payment is received. I also love that Paypal payments are integrated into it…if you choose to accept payments through Paypal.

GMail

Great interface, lots of storage, accurate spam filtering, online chat (coming soon), chat history retention, useful customization…what more could you ask for from web mail?

iCal Exchange

Free iCal hosting with a web calendar. My only complaint is there is no way to edit your calendar online, all changes must me made in iCalendar on your Mac…and then synced to iCal Exchange.

WordPress

I love WordPress.

wannaBrowser

Test the HTML output for various user agents…from any referral site…without having to keep track of a billion browsers on your own computer. This is not useful for layout and design necessarily, but can be useful for setting up your mod_rewrite rules to repel referral spam from your site.

Basecamp

Useful professional project management with multiple users and levels of access. Created by the same people that did Backpack.

Color Blender

There are a lot of color tools on the web, but this one by Eric Meyer has been the most useful to me.

43 Things

A fun way to share goals, get inspired, and network with others.

Meet with Approval

An easy, free, way to arrange a group meeting (or jam session!) without having to spend hours on the phone agreeing on a time. I would use this application all the time except for the fact that there are still people out there who don’t use the internet on a regular basis…which makes it hard to collaborate using a web based tool.