DiRT (Digital Research Tools) has a new home! Please visit Bamboo DiRT to explore this excellent collection of research tools.

What tools do the editors of DiRT consider to be essential?

Lisa Spiro, Director, Digital Media Center, Rice University:

All of my favorite tools are free:

• Diigo: easily tag, annotate and share web resources
• Google Docs: author collaborative documents
• IrfanView: free image editor and viewer for Windows; great batch processing features
• Remember the Milk: create and organize to-do lists
• TAPOR: web-based text analysis and visualization tools
• WordPress: blogging platform that makes it easy to write blog posts, track user stats, and more
• Zotero: automatically capture bibliographic information and produce bibliographies; organize, search and analayze research collections; take notes.

Carlos Galan-Diaz, researcher/PhD student, The Robert Gordon University:

can't live without the following, they are all free too :D

• delicious
• dropio
• fastladder
• TagCrowd 
• Twine 
• Zooomr