Marshall Kirkpatrick, SplashCast

New services and applications are coming online all the time and some of them can prove immediately useful for nonprofits. Here are ten of my current favorite tools for research, collaboration, and productivity.

1. News Alerts Via IM and SMS
Some things are best responded to in real time. For watching your high priority concerns, I recommend using a service that checks RSS feeds frequently and alerts you by instant message or text message whenever there is a new item of interest. Most feeds are better watched by feed readers or a start page but nothing beats real time notifications about urgent matters. This is how I break a lot of stories in my sector.

Rasasa.com is the smartest tool available, but if you're a Verizon customer in the United States you'll need to use something else. In that case, check out Zaptxt.com.

2. Start Pages for Quick Feed Monitoring
Heavy duty RSS reading is best done with a desktop reader, but for ten to 30 medium priority feeds a Start Page works well. I drop the url from my browser's address bar onto the bookmarks toolbar and click it throughout the day for a quick check-in. For super efficiency try building feeds made up of a number of sources spliced together and filtered for keywords. For example, my Start Page includes one feed made up of five top blog feeds mashed together and filtered for the word "video." This allows me to see when these blogs write about video in a very small space in my Start Page. You can use FeedRinse.com to do this.

Pageflakes.com works well as a Start Page for Firefox users, and Netvibes.com works well in Safari.

3. Collaborative Documents and Spreadsheets
Have you checked out Google Docs and Spreadsheets yet? If not, I highly recommend doing so. It's incredible!

4. Tracking Groups of Websites
Competito.us is a tool designed to help startup companies track their competitors, but it's great for compiling research on any group of websites. It has so many features that I won't go into them all here, but you can check out a review of the service that I wrote for TechCrunch.

5. Wikis
Wikis are great for making and sharing quick notes. The fastest, easiest way to make a secure wiki is PBWiki.

6. Shared Notes About Images
Collaborative visual design or annotation can be very useful. Lately I've been using Thinkature.com. It's fast, free, easy, and secure. Just drop images into a workspace, invite others, and start leaving notes on the page.

7. Donation Badges
Network for Good has built a handy widget that can be dropped into any webpage to solicit donations for a charitable organization. Beth Kanter has shown us how to rock this one - she's used it to help raise $50,000 for children's education in Cambodia. Wow!

Experimental Tools

8. Spoken Word Search in Video
Podzinger uses speech to text search to bring back videos from a wide variety of websites - including YouTube - where your search term has been said aloud. RSS feeds are available for automated monitoring. There's a lot of potential here for issue tracking.

9. VodPod
VodPod offers a bookmarklet that lets you capture your favorite videos around the web and display them in a live widget. Video is becoming an increasingly important part of the online world, and this is the best way to bookmark and share videos of interest.

10. IM for Your Calendar and To Do List
IMified.com is a brand new application that lets you interact with your calendar, to-do list, Basecamp projects, and other web based applications by instant messenger. Many people say it’s a joy to use – very fast and convenient.

Bonus Tool Just For Fun
StumbleUpon.com is a great way to discover new websites related to whatever issues interest you, and the company's new video section is the best way to discover high quality, topical videos from YouTube and Google Video. Check out the environment and art channels in particular.