While many content providers are working diligently to find ways to lock us in to their content and to exclude aggregation, it’s aggregation that I want!! I want to be able to read my content in the form and manner that fits my workflow of the moment.

Reeder for the iPad is a great example of an app that makes reading a pleasure. It’s fast; amazingly fast. I can read my Google Reader subscribed feeds, mark items for further follow-up, forward them to my Twitter feed (Note to Reeder devs: I maintain more than one Twitter account and more than one account on other social networking sites, to separate the personal from the professional roles vested in me), add it to my Instapaper account, and so on. In short, reading news feeds in Reeder is a pleasure; very nearly perfect.

Audacity is a free, cross-platform sound editor.

Notepad++ is a free, Windows-only text editor offering syntax coloring, line numbers, and other programmer-centric features.

TextWrangler is a free, Mac-only text editor with advanced features such as regular expression find and replace, syntax coloring, line numbering, etc., making it an excellent free choice for programmers.

G.I.M.P. is an open source, free, cross-platform alternative to commercial image editing software.

CMapTools is a free, cross-platform that allows the user to create and share concept maps for any topic they choose. Concept maps can be used for brainstorming activities, to assess students’ models of concept domains, or to capture individual or group domain knowledge.