Freemind is an open source mindmapping application similar to commercial products like MindManager.

It allows to draw mind maps in an easy and fast way. The data trees can be expanded and folded at will. Dragging and copying parts of a tree to reorganize things is also one of the key features.

Freemind is written in Java and released under the GNU GPL license.

Google allows to search scholar materials such as articles from specialized media or books through scholar.google.com.

Special features include the name of the author displayed in the search results as well as how many times the work has been cited.

This might be a very useful help for people writing some thesis and is most likely to start the end of plagiarism in this field.

Sitepoint has an article about a "USB Private Virtual Machine" released by MetroPipe.

It's running a variant of Damnsmall Linux with the Mozilla Firefox browser and the Thunderbird email client (including Enigmail for GPG based encryption) pre-installed. All of this within a CPU emulation using QEMU.

Another very neat feature is the persistent home directory, which allows to use a foreign computer without leaving any trace on it.

The private virtual machine is fully based on open source GPL software and thus is released under the GPL license too.

The linux version of the new car navigation software TomTom Go was released under the GNU GPL.

A page dedicated to open source software by TomTom is also available.

More information about TomTom Go is available here.

Monkeyplexer is an open source email sorting tool based on the CRM114 engine. Along with a good delivery agent, such as procmail, it can organize incoming email into appropriate folders (including a "spam" folder) without the user writing any sorting rules. It can learn from its mistakes, and has high reliability, due to the excellent CRM114 classification engine.

This looks very promising, although there's not much information about the project available yet.

Beate mentions two very cool packages of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird, allowing to install those on an USB stick to carry them with you and plug them into any Windows system that crosses your way.

Extending this concept to other applications could be very interesting. For example a stick with a web application plus the software needed to run it (eg. Apache, PHP, MySQL...) would make a very nice demo.

del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager service.

Each user adds links to interesting websites with a little text and a category keyword. All other users are able to browse those links and may discover interesting things found by their peers.

Furthermore a daily most popular page lists the most popular links of the day. This feature is interesting to make up trends or hot sites.

Linklists can be subscribed to via RSS. The own ones as well as those of other users.

Jon Udell has published an interesting article on the InfoWorld site in he which talks about "Collaborative Knowledge Gardening". del.icio.us is one of his examples.

Scribe is a Firefox extension which allows to save form contents locally before sending them.

For example when you write a forum posting, blog entry or wiki page, you can save unfinished versions of text on your computer before sending the form. Very useful in cases where your computer crashes, your laptop battery is empty or when your internet connection gets dropped.

Urs Gehrig reports about a Word2Wiki converter written in VisualBasic.

This macro converts headings, bold, italics etc. and even tables into Wiki syntax, for easy posting of legacy Word-based documentation in Wikis.

Newsmap is a very interesting new way of visualising the Google News using Flash.

The news headlines are all shown on one screen. Each headline is in a box with a different background color depending on the news category. When the mouse hovers over a headline, a tooltip shows the first line of the article. The boxes are linked with the actual article.

Very useful to get a quick overview of the current news. It would be even more interesting to have it work with a collection of custom RSS feeds.

ZoneMinder is an open source Linux based video camera security solution released under the GNU GPL license.

The software is intended for use in single or multi-camera video security applications, including theft prevention and child or family member monitoring and other care scenarios. It supports capture, analysis, recording, and monitoring of video data coming from one or more video or network cameras attached to a Linux system. It is targeted at both do-it-yourself and professional installations.

ClamWin provides a simple user interface to the powerful open source Clam AntiVirus software.

It allows to select and scan a folder or file, configure settings and update virus databases. It also includes a Windows Taskbar tray icon. ClamWin also features a context menu handler for Windows Explorer which installs Scan into the right-click explorer menu for files and folders. Microsoft Outlook users may enjoy ClamWin Outlook Addin, which removes virus-infected attachments when an email is being opened.

ClamWin and ClamAV are released under the GPL license.

The features of ClamAV include:

• command-line scanner
• fast, multi-threaded daemon
• milter interface for sendmail
• database updater with support for digital signatures
• virus scanner C library
• on-access scanning (Linux)
• detection of over 20000 viruses, worms and trojans
• built-in support for RAR (2.0), Zip, Gzip, Bzip2
• built-in support for Mbox, Maildir and raw mail files

A very interesting point is that their online virus database is kept well up to date, so that the scanner is able to recognize even the latest viruses. This makes it a viable replacement for commercial antivirus solutions.

MailBucket allows to get newsletters and mailing lists as RSS.

The principle is easy: opt-in to a newsletter or mailing list using an email address like bla@mailbucket.org and MailBucket produces an RSS feed like mailbucket.org/bla.xml. Each mail coming in is listed as an entry on the feed.

Very useful when you don't want your inbox scattered by mailing list traffic or when you prefer to keep your email address away from spammers but still would like to get the info.

Nick Bradbury has released the final version of his cool desktop RSS news aggregator called FeedDemon. It looks like the author of HomeSite and TopStyle is just launching another piece of cutting edge software. The trial version of FeedDemon can be used 30 times, the full version costs US$29.95.

FeedDemon includes all the basic functionality of a normal desktop feedreader and some special gimmicks:

• Channels can be displayed with some style, making them look like a newspaper.
• News items can be moved into custom news bins for future reference.
• Watches allow to have FeedDemon keep track of news about a given topic by supplying some keywords. The concept is similar to the Google News Alerts service.

Some screenshots are available as well.

LinkChecker is designed to check HTML documents for broken links.

Features:

• HTTP/1.1 and 1.0, HTTPS, FTP, mailto:, news:, nntp:,
  Gopher, Telnet and local file links are supported. Javascript links are currently ignored
• restrict link checking with regular expression filters for URLs
• proxy support
• give username/password for HTTP and FTP authorization
• robots.txt exclusion protocol support

A very useful tool to check your homepage and a nice christmas gift to your favourite CMS

According to the cool features listed below the new version of the HP Web JetAdmin seems like a must-have for any admin who has to deal with HP printers.

New features include supply alerts, scheduled firmware upgrades, proactive notification of upgrades, detection of other Web Jetadmin installations, new device columns, and new device filters.

Interestingly enough HP publishes updates of this software on freshmeat. It seems like they have found freshmeat to be a good way to reach their target customers: network admins

Here is a nice Perl script which parses the Google News in any language and produces an RSS feed out of it.

Roger Fischer blogs about the spanish company DiceLaRed which specialises in "information analysis and turning the abundance of contents into business opportunities" (please bear with my spanish).

They have two main products/services:
Medsweep is a software which crawls different news sources, weblogs and forums on the web in order to outline breaking and important news belonging to a specific topic. Basically something like the Google News but in a customizable and targetable fashion.

Netnografias is a software which allows to monitor discussions between persons taking place in forums and blogs all over the web. The aim being to know and outline the customer's opinion and needs without having to ask for it.

This all sounds very promising also because there are some nice examples on the website.

Here is a list of some very interesting open source OCR projects out there:

Clara OCR
Clara OCR is a free (GPL) OCR for systems that support the C library and the X windows system (e.g. most flavours of Unix). The development platform of Clara OCR is 32-bit Intel running GNU/Linux.
Clara OCR is intended for large scale digitalization projects. It features a powerful GUI and a web interface for cooperative digitalization of books. Clara OCR development started in 1999 and we're approaching production quality.

Ocrad
Ocrad is an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program implemented as a filter and based on a feature extraction method. It reads a bitmap image in pbm format and outputs text in ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) charset.
Also includes a layout analyser able to separate the columns or blocks of text normally found on printed pages.
Ocrad can be used as a stand-alone console application, or as a backend to other programs.

Kooka: Scan and OCR suite for KDE which uses GOCR.

GOCR
GOCR/JOCR is an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program which can be used with different front-ends and thus is very easy to port to different OSes and architectures. It can open many different image formats, and its quality have been improving in a daily basis.

phpOCR
phpOCR is an Optical Character Recognition system written for use in automated scripts. It is not ment to be used for large amount of data. The very first code is written in PHP but that may change because of speed considerations. It uses PHP GD library.