Thanks to great contributions by community members, the SSC tool count marches upward and onward! We’ve gotten great additions recently from a number of SSC users, including:

• Rolf, who created a toolbox called Thunderbird as RSS Reader, detailing the collection of plugins and tools he uses to manage his RSS feeds;
• Lena, who added CopyWrite and Grammarian X to her personal toolbox, and put picnik in her Basic media editing toolbox;
• Shane, who built a collection of Tools for building scalable web apps; and
• Deacon78, who created Production Toolkit, listing websites for the independent filmmaker.

Thanks to all you users who are putting your data and knowledge into SSC!

An interesting number we speculate on from time to time is “what is the size of the noprofit software tool universe”? In other words, what is the total count of software tools relevant to nonprofit needs? It’s a squishy number, based on a range of issues:

• What qualifies as “nonprofit” or “NGO” software?
• What tools are “general” tools, versus sector-specific tools (health and human services, human rights, legal, etc)?
• What is a tool? With hosted web apps playing a larger and larger role in the technology footprint of most organizations, the definition of “tool” continues to evolve. We’re fairly permissive on “tool-ness” when it comes to web apps; if it’s an interactive site that provides unique value to individual users, we’re inclined to call it a tool.

We welcome your comments on any and all of the above!