Embeddable Mind Maps – WiseMapping offers an online collaborative home for mind maps with some nice features. In addition to a graphical editor and the ability to invite others to work on your mind maps, they offer the ability to link a topic to any page on the internet with automatic snapshotting. They’ve also got export to SVG, PDF, or the free desktop mindmapping application FreeMind.

Beyond that, though, they’ve implemented their solution using SVG and VML, which means maps from WiseMapping are embeddable on other web pages (something not easily done with Flash-based maps). The drawbacks? Customizations are fairly basic, and they only work in a limited set of browsers.

Get Your GrandCentral – We’ve written before about the GrandCentral phone management system. Now, thanks to Blogger (both are owned by Google these days), you can skip the waiting period and sign up immediately for the service. There’s a link from that Blogger Buzz page, and though it says it’s for users of Blogger, it appears that the signup link is open to anyone.

Internet in the Sky – The Wall Street Journal is running an article about Space Data Corp. – a company that launches cheap hydrogen balloons with wireless transmitters attached, serving as the equivalent of cell phone towers in the sky. We’ve heard about similar dreams before, but this one is actually up and running. There may be hope for rural internet yet.

Now Your Can Bungee Too – Bungee Connect (which we covered in a look at their earlier alpha version) has opened the doors on its public beta. Give them your email address and you can immediately start using their all-web IDE to build and deploy mashup applications. Since the alpha, they’ve improved and polished many aspects of their toolchain, and providing you’re willing to go up the learning curve, they look to be a serious contender.

This is the first moment of truth for Bungee. They’ve got a good story and some high-powered tools – the question is, now that they’ve built it, who will come? Their introductory videos will get you started quickly, but mastering the depth will be a challenge for many developers.

Another Free Wiki – Wikidot offers free wikis by pretty much any measure you can think of: you can host your own wiki for free on a subdomain of their site, or download their codebase under an open source license and install it on your own servers. They have a pretty powerful feature set: in addition to standard wiki markup, you can create equations or embed objects; they’ve got a whole section of useful code snippets in their own help wiki. They’ll even do free mapping to your own domain and tack on a forum to your wiki if you want.

Twitter Tool du Jour – Twitterlights comes from the folks behind i-Lighter, and serves as both a useful Twitter tool and an introduction to their broader capabilities. Adds “Twitter this” to any web page, as well as the ability to highlight and send text.

Think Yours is Messier Than Mine? – The folks over at MyFax are sponsoring a contest to find the messiest office in the US or Canada. To enter, you just need to fill out their form and show them a picture or video of your disaster area. The prize? A cool $10,000 in cash for the messiest of the messiest.

We’re three weeks out of five into the contest, so you can already see some of the finalists on their web site. From the looks of things, the competition is pretty stiff. Of course, if you’ve been rigorously following our advice on organizing your life and getting things done, you have no chance of winning this one. Sorry about that.

Jobs for the Creative – There are already plenty of online job sites, but CreativeHub still thinks there’s room for one more in the fray. Their hook is that they’re focused exclusively on creative jobs, and they offer hosting for portfolios to make it easier to show clients the quality of work you can do.

Taking a Social Network Break – That’s the premise of NOSO, a sort of performance art project in the anti-social-networking break. When you feel overwhelmed with too many online obligations, you sign up to participate in a “noso”: a non-networking non-event, in which people agree to be quietly in the same space and not interact. Not myup of tea, but I’m sure some folks enjoy it.

Online Picture Editor – PicResize actually does a lot more than just resize pictures these days. After uploading a picture from your hard drive, you can crop or resize it, change the orientation, or apply a small variety of art effects (Oil painting, sharpen, blur, and so on). When you’re done, just click Save to get back a jpg, gif, or png of your edited image.

There’s nothing here that you can’t do with a variety of client-side tools, of course, but if you’re stranded on a computer that’s not your own, this is an easy way to do simple editing. They’ve also got an API and a batch resizer tool.

A Thousand Words in 140 Characters – Twitxr is the latest clone of Twitter to surface. The “hook” here is that you can add photos to your posts, as well as 140 characters of text. They’ve got a one-stop iPhone native client, as well as a web interface and an API. You can echo Twitxr posts to Twitter or Facebook as well.

Supercharge FF3 – One of the problems some people have been having with Firefox 3 is that the increased security checking for extensions makes installing some popular extensions tough. The folks at Lifehacker have done something about this for their own extensions, and you can now get FF3-compatible versions of their Better YouTube, Better GReader, and Better Gmail 2 extensions. Definitely useful if you want to tweak these popular sites to work a bit better.

Marketing help for MicroISVs – WWD contributor Bob Walsh has released a new ebook, MicroISV Sites That Sell!, that should be of interest to anyone trying to hawk a software product over the internet. The ebook is all about coming up with a “unique selling proposition” even if you don’t understand what a USP is when you pick it up. Aimed squarely at software developers, it takes a design pattern approach to marketing, with step-by-step exercises that anyone ought to be able to follow.

I had a chance to read a copy in prepublication, and it’s darned good work. The next time I find myself involved with a small software company selling to niche markets, this one is going to come right off my shelf for another read.

Flexible Calendar Sharing – Calgoo Hub is the latest entry in the calendar sharing sweepstakes, claiming to deliver the “world’s first cross-platform calendar sharing.” “Cross-platform” in this case refers to the variety of calendars it can handle (Outlook, Google, Calgoo, iCal, Plaxo, and more), but the Hub software itself only runs on Windows. You’ll need a free Calgoo account and the download to get started. After that, you get flexible sharing with public & private URLs and automatic emails.

Coworking Spreads – As you probably already know, we’re fans of coworking. Now web workers in sunny San Diego have a new alternative for coworking, with the opening of a space in the digital-telepathy offices. They’re looking for Web 2.0 pros to share, and offer a wide variety of amenities.

Amazing Keyboards – Richard Nagy builds amazing “steampunk” style custom keyboards, and if you have a spare $800 or $1000 laying around, he’ll build one for you too. The price seems exorbitant at first, but once you see these creations and ponder what goes into them in terms of materials and labor it’s not out of line. Antiqued brass and copper, old typewriter keys, custom accents…the end result is spectacular.

Not for everyone, surely, but if you find yourself searching for a gift for the web worker who has everything, one of these would be a practically unique way to go. Gorgeous work.

Easy S3 Access – Amazon S3 provides a reliable and inexpensive way to store lots of info online, but using a dedicated client to interact with it can be a nuisance. InfiniteBits provides a solution by offering standard web browser and FTP access to Amazon S3 storage. Their free basic plan gives you 5GB of storage and a 10 day file time limit on their own S3 storage. Paid plans, starting at $4.95 a month, allow you to use your own S3 account and keep files around forever.

Hosted Time Tracking – Clockspot provides a web-based timeclock and timesheet solution at prices starting at $10 per month. Features include time tracking by phone or web, editing only with managerial approval, mileage tracking, and automatic detection of “suspicious clock times.” Aimed at folks with multiple employees.

One for the Paper Lovers – The Xambox is a new device from Xamance, a French company. Their site is in French, but there’s an English promotional video up on YouTube. The device is reminiscent of the Fujitsu ScanSnap, but with a twist. In addition to scanning documents to indexed PDFs, it also files the hard copies for you in a special tray. If you ever need the actual piece of paper, the application will tell you where to find it – “three places beyond the black divider,” for example.

If you’re in a business where you feel you have to keep the originals, but don’t want to be bothered with filing them, this looks like an interesting solution to getting a hybrid paperless-paperful office going. No pricing information that I can see, and I can’t find an obvious place to order one, but perhaps our eagle-eyed readers can help.

Send a Bunch of Links – LinkBunch is a link-shortening service (similar to the selection we reviewed a while back), but with a twist: you can enter a whole list of links, and it will give you one shorter link to represent them all. The recipient clicks the LinkBunch link to get back to the list, and can then visit individual pages or open them all in tabs.

The Reporting of Crowds – Commuter Feed is a free service that turns Twitter into an ad-hoc traffic reports network. Twitterers send in their traffic and accident reports tagged by city airport code, and the aggregate is searchable on their web site. It’s an interesting idea, but of course it depends on people actually reporting, which means it’s most useful in major tech-metro areas. They’ve also got a small spam problem.

Out-Googling Google – ManagedQ isn’t really a new search engine, since it uses Google’s results. But what it does with those results is pretty stunning. Put in a search term, and you get back a page of site thumbnails (large enough to be generally readable), and a batch of common extracted terms (people, places, and things) down the left hand side. Click a term to add that to the filter; click the Next and Previous panels to flip through results. Just start typing to do an instant search (using regular expressions if you want) across the text of all displayed pages.

The result is a sort of visual search experience that is very flexible and great for quickly focusing in on the best results from a Google sea. And amazingly enough, it’s actually fast, despite all the behind-the-scenes rendering and ajax trickery that must be going on.

RSS Made Easy – Yeah, there are a boat load of RSS readers around and various schemes to make RSS more accessible to the common man. Here’s another. WebSlides takes any RSS feed or list of bookmarks and turns it into a slideshow. You can tweak the view, add an audio track, and share the result as a URL or turn it into a widget for your own blog.

Low-fat Twitter – Even if you don’t have the time for endless chatting on Twitter, it can be a good source of interesting links to follow; the spammers mostly haven’t discovered it yet. You can get the links and nothing but the links by visiting TwitterLinkr, which will show you all links or a tag cloud view of popular links. It’s got its own RSS feed, too.

Flickr for Mac Users – Photonic is a new third-party client for Flickr that runs in Mac OS X. Instead of accessing Flickr through the web, you get a dedicated browser application on your desktop. You can see your own or your friends’ streams, search, and even set up and perform bulk uploads. When you’re ready to work with a particular photo, double-click and Photonic opens the appropriate web page for you.

Currently in beta (but reasonably stable), Photonic only runs on Leopard and is set to sell for $20.

Tracking Google Readers – RSSmeme is a new service that shows the activities of Google Reader users by tracking and aggregating shared Google Reader feeds. It has various slices of the activity, including what’s going on right now as well as a “popular this week” page. You can also set up your own search that looks at Google Reader feeds – and if you like, consume that search (or any other page on the site) as its own RSS feed. Reminiscent of ReadBurner, but with a nicer design and apparently more active development.

A Cautionary Tale – Apophenia relays the story of a user who got his Orkut account phished and was very soon locked out of 4 years of GMail archives, as well as calendar and other Google services. There’s a happy ending in this case, but others in the comments were not so lucky. It is worth thinking about whether you’ve got data out there hanging by a thread that you might want to back up somehow.

A Better Cashboard – Estimating, time tracking, and invoicing application Cashboard has added some new features since the last time we looked at them. Changes in the last six months or so include fully customizable templates for estimates and invoices, better editing facilities, and faster synchronization with Basecamp.

Although pricing remains the same (free plan available with some features, with successively more expensive subscriptions depending on capacity), they’ve also adjusted their pricing structure by making unlimited client logins a part of every plan.

We’ve All Had One – If you’re spending part of your consulting hours wondering how you ever got stuck with a particular client, here’s a 20-question test designed to answer the question “Is Your Client a Certified Asshole?” Of course, it’s from Bob Sutton, author of The No Asshole Rule, which we’ve mentioned in passing before. Even if you don’t need the validation of your views about your worst client, you might pick up the necessary permission to cut them loose here.

Most Pointless Mashup – The award for today goes to Real World Racer, a web application that overlays little cars on Google Maps, hooks up the arrow keys to control them, and lets you race against the computer. I had a fine time crashing my little car into Boston Harbor when I missed a checkpoint.

Send the Bureaucrats Home – As we’ve pointed out before, the federal government is home to some of the most ambitious telework programs around. Now comes the news that Lurita Doan, current administrator of the General Services Administration (the folks in charge of running buildings and offices for the government, among other things) has set a goal of having 50% of her staff telecommuting by 2010 (up from the current 10%).

This isn’t a complete radical decentralization of the office, as the government counts you as a teleworker if you spend 1 or more days per week offsite. But it is certainly a big step in the direction of validating what many web workers already know: that there are many, many jobs that need not be tied to a traditional office setting.

One-Stop Website Shopping – GoodBarry is trying to make things easy for small businesses online by combining all sorts of things into a single tool: content management for your site, basic CRM, email marketing, tracking, and online store management. Seems like this will be easier for many people than dealing with a whole handful of different sites and tools. They’ve also got reseller and white-label programs for designers who want to start out with the GoodBarry platform when putting together solutions for their own clients.

Piggyback Invoicing – Simply Invoices is not a general-purpose online invoicing solution. Rather, it’s invoicing for people who already use Basecamp to track clients and time. Customize your invoice templates, pick a project and start and end dates, and you get downloadable PDF invoices as well as online invoice management.

A Different View of Search – Google isn’t quite standing still on search, though they’re certainly not rolling out user interface revolutions at a fast pace. Still, a visit to the Google Labs Experimental Search page gives you a few things to pay with. The latest thing they’ve rolled out is the ability to take search results and plot them on a map or a timeline, or integrate images directly into the main search results.

The additional info doesn’t seem to slow things down and may even be helpful, though I’d rather Google spotted the helpful views and showed them to me automatically. If you’re on the lookout for Google tweaks, it’s also worth having a look at the CustomizeGoogle extension for Firefox.

Site Snooping – If you can overlook its attempts to sell you SEO services, BuiltWith is actually a reasonably useful way to figure out what’s behind a particular site that you’re interested in. Type in a URL and click Lookup, and you can find out where it’s hosted, what it’s using for server technology, and a bit about the web tech on its home page. There are also links to do further lookups at sites like Alexa, Compete, Technorati and DomainTools.

Automatic Photo Enhancement – As a jack-of-all-trades web developer, I find myself needing to tune up photos from time to time, but not often enough to really invest the time or money in learning PhotoShop. If you’re on the same boat (and you use a Mac), then Jade is worth a look. It handles things like deblurring and contrast and color enhancement automatically, without requiring a lot of manual intervention, to just improve the pictures you already have. 30-day demo available.

Huddle ups the Free Ante – We’ve looked at Huddle, an online team-management tool in the same general arena as SharePoint or Basecamp, before. But in connection with this week’s DEMO conference, they made a couple of announcements that make them worth a second look. First, they’ve substantially upped the capabilities available for free: you can now get 3 workspaces (“huddles”), 1GB of storage, and unlimited users without paying. Higher-end plans get rid of advertising and add SSL security and custom branding, as well as additional storage.

The other thing they’ve done is offer integration with Facebook. If you’re a Facebook user, you can install the Workspaces by Huddle application and start using your account there for something other than throwing sheep. Looks like a smart way to reach more potential users to me.

Time Tracking Online – There’s no shortage of ways to track your time online, but that doesn’t stop new services from coming to my attention. Two that have popped up recently for me are PayMo and LiveTimer. PayMo offers web-based reporting with Windows and Mac desktop timers and a slick Web 2.0-ish interface. It’s free for up to three users, and can allocate time across clients, projects, and tasks. LiveTimer gives you a web-based stopwatch, customizable classifications for time, and an API for developers, as well as customizable reports. It comes with a 30-day trial and then goes to $5 per user per month.

Easy CRM Alternative – Simple Sales Tracking lives up to its name as a starter solution for online CRM. You can track your contacts through a 3-stage pipeline (lead to opportunity to account). It keeps track of calendars, tasks, and contacts across your whole team, and provides a dashboard with an overview of how everything is coming together. Free as long as you’re not tracking more than 50 sales at a time, $15 a month for more than that.

The Limits of Privacy – Photo-sharing site SmugMug has a problem. Whether it’s a PR problem or a privacy problem, I’ll leave you to decide. The basic facts, as brought out by Philipp Lenssen over at Google Blogoscoped, are pretty straightforward: SmugMug uses an easily-guessed scheme for gallery and photo URLs, so a gallery marked “private” is really open to public browsing unless it’s also password-protected. In my own testing it took less than ten minutes to find a gallery by URL-hacking that I couldn’t get to via search (fortunately, that particular one only contained baby pictures).

That said, the process is tedious (though obviously open to automation), and apparently there has been no hue-and-cry from SmugMug users over the nature of privacy on the site. SmugMug’s CEO Don MacAskill responded to Lenssen saying that they did not currently see this as a major issue, but “If our customers (or potential customers) asked us to adopt GUIDs because this was a bigger issue than we were aware – we would.” With the news starting to ricochet around the blogosphere, I suspect this may become a bigger issue faster than MacAskill counted on. I also suspect there will be a lot more random SmugMug URLs typed into browsers in the immediate future.

Location-based News – That’s the idea behind EveryBlock, which promises “a news feed for your block” – at least if you live in San Francisco, Chicago, or New York. They combine crime reports, Flickr postings, restaurant reviews, news, and whatever else they can find into a searchable-by-address interface with maps. The problems: if you’re not in those cities, you’re out of luck. And it’s not real clear that the internet is a better way to find out what’s happening on your block then, you know, going down to the laundromat or bodega on the corner. But good luck to them.

The Fishbowl is Us – If you think we spend too much time on WWD talking about Twitter, the long tail, avatars, and similar internet chaff, then you won’t find Ron Ploof’s “You might be in the fishbowl if…” at all funny. But if you are already steeped in the social networking tea, there are probably a few laughs lurking in this list and the comments.

Quick Web Sites – There are lots of online tools to help you put together a web site quickly. The latest I’ve run across is Tank, which does indeed seem to streamline the process nicely. After an instant signup process you can create a new site, choosing between various canned templates (business, personal, and so on) or starting from scratch. Sites are composed of a hierarchy of pages, any number of post-oriented sections (blogs or journals) and any number of photo albums. You can change the formatting and edit text easily in their tabbed UI, with the markup using a very simple text-based engine. It’s possible to bang together something that doesn’t look half-bad quite quickly.

Your sites run on a subdomain of withtank.com for free for as long as you want to keep them in development mode. If you get to the point where you want to move to your own domain, or need more than 10MB of storage or 100MB of bandwidth, you need to move to a paid plan. Tank itself is under rapid development with new features coming along at a good clip.

Mozy Goes Enterprise – EMC, which owns the Mozy backup service, has introduced Mozy Enterprise, a high-end version aimed at corporate network administrators. It’s still offsite backup, but the Enterprise version offers better encryption, hot backups of Exchange and SQL Server, open and locked file support, and a central administrative console. For pricing you’ll need to talk to your EMC rep.

Passwords the Old-Fashioned Way – Can’t decide between browser-based password management and dedicated password programs? There’s another alternative: the Internet Password Organizer, a 5.5×8 inch spiral-bound book designed especially for recording account login information, as well as information about your ISP, network, and software licenses.

Travel with a Buddy – Personal travel assistant site Tripit (which we’ve written about before) is taking a step beyond just helping you organize all the emails that make up a travel itinerary. Now they want to help you share your trips with friends and colleagues, with the addition of social networking features to their site.

If you’ve got a Tripit account, you can start importing friends, either by entering email addresses or grabbing a whole address book from Gmail, Hotmail, LinkedIn, or other serves. Once you have a critical mass of friends online, you can start seeing which ones are going to be in the same area as you (and vice versa). The “closeness” notification happens automatically, but you have to actually share a trip for your friends to see the details of your itinerary.

Easy Excel Sharing – If you need to collaborate on Excel spreadsheets (on Windows, at least), take a look at eXpresso. It’s a software as a service offering that lets you upload your spreadsheets, share them, and collaborate in real time. Features include region-based security, email alerts, file comparison, and file history. Looks like a solid alternative to Google Documents if you need all the functionality of Excel but still want that online sharing goodness.

Social Networking Survey – Over at our sister site FoundRead, they’re investigating how social networking tools can help us all work better. One way you can help is to visit that page and click through to take the survey on the State of Social Networking. You’ll be entered into a drawing for an Apple iPhone if you do.