A lot of you read yesterday's post about the school teacher who cautioned us that spreading the "misconception of free software" is harmful. Today we're going to put a positive spin on things.

Free software does exist. Every retail customer that I've built a computer for in the past six years has at least three pieces of free or Open Source software on his or her system. It's everywhere, and we're all using it - even Karen, whether she realizes it or not.

So now it's time for "Sharin' with Karen." Which of your favorite free applications would you like her (and others like her) to know about and use? They might be well known - like Firefox or OpenOffice - or they might be relative unknowns - like Network Notepad.

Let's keep things positive - after all, we're talking about software that someone else is sharing with you!

Post your picks, and I'll put together a roundup for the weekend.

Maybe we'll help change some minds!

If you've ever had the good fortune of having one of your websites or blog posts dugg to the point of showing up on digg's homepage, you've enjoyed a huge traffic boost to your site. This is wonderful for web publishers, and I'm not going to lie and say that we don't care about it here at Download Squad; in fact, since the success of a given post is measured in large part by the traffic it drives to our site, it's certainly a goal of ours to have our posts make the homepage on digg.

But how valuable is digg traffic, really, and is the digg community one that we should even care about? Unfortunately, after observing the digg community for about a year, I'd have to conclude no, it's not. Now, at this point I should point out that AOL owns Weblogs Inc, who own Download Squad, and AOL also owns Netscape, recently converted into a social news and media voting site that is in many ways similar to digg. So if you don't think I can be objective about this, you might want to just skip this post. But I'm not here to sing the praises of Netscape over digg either. Overall, I'm not certain that social media sites like Netscape, digg, reddit, del.icio.us, or even the granddaddy of them all - Slashdot - will have any relevance whatsoever in five years.

Okay, so now that I've condemned a whole class of website, or really a whole class of online community, I should point out that while digg drives the largest amount of traffic of the bunch, the community at digg is actually rotting from the inside out.

This is a very inflammatory statement to make, but all it takes is to browse through the comments on few random frontpage posts at digg, and you'll see what I mean. The sheer level of superiority, sarcasm, and general negativity is overwhelming, and makes digg a place that is not only not fun to visit, it's certainly not a place to "share, discover, bookmark, and promote the news that's important to you", as digg's tagline optimistically claims.

Since I'm a card-carrying Google Reader convert, I've been loosely following the discussions in its Google Group. I'm constantly impressed with how active some of their engineers like Chris and Mihai are in the conversation, and just the other day they announced some small but much-requested updates and bug fixes to Reader, including:

• First and foremost: An "Add to folder" menu after using the subscribe bookmarklet, the Firefox 2.0 subscribe button and the "Add to Google" button
• The "Feed actions..." menu lets you rename the feed and change its folders
• Some IE 7 display bugs have been fixed
• Some IE 6 display bugs have been fixed
• OPML import should be more tolerant of invalid characters
• The filtering that can be done in the settings page now handles multiple terms (separate them with spaces)
• The settings page should display faster when you have lots of subscriptions

Nothing major, though that 'Add to folder' button is a God-send (Google-send?) for adding new subscriptions and easily filing them away without breaking one's workflow.

Download Squad readers totally rock! To everyone, thanks for all the feedback on our RSS Readers: SOUND OFF! post. There are so many options to choose from, and I haven't had a chance to really go through them all, so I will be posting my thoughts on the top RSS readers in the next week or two. DLSQ's reader-cloud is much wiser than I am. Several of the readers you mentioned I had never heard of. Thanks to everyone. I have a new favorite out of all the RSS readers I glanced at over the weekend. Drumroll and spotlights please...GreatNews is the winner! Not only was GreatNews the most recommended at last count (tied with Sage) but it is simple and powerful. I love it. I really like the newpaper layout and easy to use features. My favorite part about it was the ability to enter a web address, and GreatNews will pull any feeds from the page and list them at the bottom via an RSS icon. A simple click or two and you've subscribed. It is a piece of cake. Here are your top results:

• GreatNews - 8 votes
• Sage (firefox plugin - 8 votes
• FeedDemon - 6 votes
• Flock - 6 votes
• Google Reader - 6 votes
• Bloglines - 5 votes
• Netvibes - 5 votes
• Omea - 4 votes

Others were Bloxor, Alesti, Abilon, Endo, FeedLounge, FeedReader, Gregarius, Klipfolio, Onfolio, RSSbandit, Fizzle, Thunderbird, Vienna, Opera, RSSpopper, IntraVnews, Pluck, Reblog, SharpReader, Rojo, NewsAlloy, NewsHutch, IE7, humanized, BlogBridge, Awasu, a few homegrown varieties (very cool) and a few others I may have missed.

Just counting all the feed readers out there would be a daunting task, much less actually choosing one. Fortunately we have people like Ryan Stewart and Richard MacManus, who've written a round-up of their picks for best-of-breed RSS readers over at Read/WriteWeb. Stewart and MacManus split the task into three categories: Web-based, desktop, and "rich internet application." The latter category is a bit hard to pin down. Stewart and MacManus' idea of an "RIA" is an app that takes the best from both the desktop and the web, i.e. the power of a desktop app with the locationless (and install-less) and social aspects of a web app. For web-based readers, MacManus chooses Rojo (which I recently praised here) and Bloglines, and for the desktop NewsGator and BlogBridge. For the RIA category they don't have any definitive picks, but MacManus tentatively taps Google Reader, FeedLounge, and Goowy. Head over to Read/WriteWeb to read the full article, or post your own picks in the comments.