I’m a small business owner and recently the online world is making things allot easier for me, I can even do my tax returns online now. There has been allot of hype about web 2.0, e.g. blogs, online social networking, online desktops, ajax etc. Some hate the web 2.0 catch phrase or if you’re like me you just accept it for what it is; a new more dynamic web no longer a place where you just look for and collect information but a place where you can store and organize it too.

Here are some of the tools/applications i use all the time.

• del.icio.us : A brilliant online bookmark system and with the recent firefox extension it just got allot better. Its very simply in principle but extremely useful for storing links to your favorite articles, websites, what ever. As an added bonus you can also see what are the most popular links tagged by the community giving you a great insight into whats hip and exciting on the web.

  USE : I use this everyday you can view my del.icio.us links on this blog.

• Wordpress : This doesn’t act as a service in the way that the rest do or at least it doesn’t for me because I’ve installed wordpress on my own server. You can however now use the hosted blog software at http://www.wordpress.com which has all the great features of this installed version. A great piece of expandable blog publishing software and best of all its free.

  USE : I don’t use it as much as I should.

• Bloglines : There are loads of news readers out there and I can’t say I’ve used many of them but bloglines has everything I need to keep up to date on what interests me, be it news, sport or technology.

  USE : I never fail to check in on this each day I’m in work.

• Basecamp : Widely publizied and rightly so, one of the first to make a mark with a SME online business application. Great for project managment and keeping everything relevant to a specific project in one place.

  USE : Not everyday but most

• Blinksale : Online invoicing, great for the small to medium service companies and freelancers.

  USE : Well as often as I need to send them out. (hopefully more and more.. )

• 1time : And last but not least we use 1time to keep track of time for each project and team member. This is our little baby and only in alpha at the moment. I’ll have more on this soon, once we release it (Early 2006).

Others worth mentioning:
YouSendIt - Easy way to send large files
Meebo - Instant messaging in your browser
Digg - News aggregate site

Ones I’m keeping an eye on:
Squidoo- Sort of like wikipedia but with a strong community.
Shopify - A web 2.0 style shopping cart

Did I miss any?