Over at TechCrunch I've been reviewing more web 2.0 startups than you can shake a stick at; while the crowd over there is generally not focused on social change, an awful lot of interesting things come our way that could prove helpful in a nonprofit context. Here are some of my favorites from last week, in order of usefulness.

Links go to full reviews on TechCrunch.

Diigo: it's del.icio.us plus a whole lot more

My favorite new product in a long time is Diigo, a social bookmarking and annotation service. So many features I won't list them all here (click the title above to read full review) but it's a powerful research tool that synchs with del.ico.us and several other social bookmarking services. I review far more products than I end up actually using long term - but this one is a keeper. Tag, leave notes for yourself and others, plus lots of search power.

FlickrStorm

FlickrStorm is a better search in Flickr; search related tags, batch save - including Creative Commons licensed photos. Very useful.

Topix.net relaunches awesome news search

Topix.net relaunched this week and is now not only the most powerful news search engine online, it's finally usable. It's archive is more extensive, goes back further and is easier to navigate around in than Google and Yahoo! news. It incorporates blogs, forums, RSS and graphic visualization nicely. Give it a try, you may find yourself going back.

Yahoo! provides personalized search

Do you have a website that you'd like to have an easy to install search function for? Yahoo! just came out with one called the Yahoo! Search Builder. Putting search into any site has been a real struggle for a long time. No more.

Attensa releases beta Outlook product

If you use Outlook, you might really appreciate Attensa's new Outlook based RSS reader. It lets you read feeds inside Outlook, but more importantly it helps deal with the information overload that often comes with RSS. Attensa uses a long list of different types of "attention data" to help prioritize your different sources of information. The display in outlook displays your top and bottom priorities manually in an Outlook sidebar, but the bulk of your feed subscriptions are ordered dynamically according to how often and when you click, read, tag or email items from each feed.

So if you check the feed that searches for your organization's name each morning at 8:00, then that feed will automatically be at the top of your list at 8am each day. If you never read anything in the feed for my personal blog, MarshallK.com (because I never write there anymore!) then my feed will drop way down out of site.

That's only the beginning of what Attensa does, but it's the most advanced of all the business RSS readers available and definitely worth a look.

Newsgator offers browser toolbar

If you use Bloglines to read feeds I highly recommend checking out web based feed reader Newsgator. In addition to offering greater flexibility in feed reading and better handling of bundled subscriptions (OPML), the company just released a browser toolbar that provides one click subscription, displays the number of Newsgator subscribers to any page's feed and shows inbound links to the page you are on. Very nice.

For some reason this is only available for Windows users in IE or FireFox. If that's not you and you are still interested in this functionality, check out Blummy.com, the megabookmarklet. It will help you one-click subscribe in Newsgator just like you can in Bloglines and much more.

If you've grown frustrated with the slowness of web based feed readers (I have) check out Newsgator's desktop products, FeedDeemon and NetNewsWire.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/08/07/desktoptwo-is-free-web-based-computing/">English/Spanish free virtual desktop DesktopTwo is easy to use

If you're someone who uses more than one computer and would like to store files, use IM, play music and do a whole lot of other things on each computer - you should check out DesktopTwo. It's a free virtual desktop from a company that just launched an English version after its Spanish version built a huge user base.

Ok, that's a wrap. Hope some of these resources will be useful in a nonprofit context!