Zoji is an online, social networking community that offers helpful tools, simple searching and invitations with a twist. Below, I have put ten good reasons to try it out:

Familiarity: Zoji has aspects that are similar to Craigslist, wherein your main screen can be tailored to your hometown since everything you see, places you go, events you attend and parties you throw are all in the same city.

Hip Invites: Zoji allows you to create pretty awesome invites and send them out to your friends. Your friends can accept your invitation without signing up – which is great! After the event is over, all of your friends can share pictures and post comments on how much fun they had.

Here’s a snippet of my party on Happy Street!

Calendar of Memories: Zoji has a built in calendar that keeps all of your invites and party pictures on the date the event occurred. The calendar gives you an overall view of your adventurous year.

Customization: It wouldn’t be a complete social networking site if you couldn’t customize your profile, and therefore Zoji offers Profile pages VERY similar to Myspace. This should make people happy, right?

Stay “In the Know”: If you are planning to travel to an area or just looking for places close to home, Zoji allows you to search for tasty restaurants, upbeat clubs, and bars within miles of a zip code. Once you find a restaurant that interests you there is an option to “plan an event” right on the restaurant page, which then instantly directs you to the invitation creation station.

Give Props: If you consider yourself well-versed in your city and you know the best dish to eat at the “hole-in-the-wall” diner, you can write a review. You can bring in more business for your favorite place.

Rock On: Who doesn’t love music? You can search “bandz” in your city and see who is playing in your area. You can organize friends to go check out a band, and with a click you can become a fan. Most Zoji promoted bandz have an instant-listen mp3.

Easy Instant Messaging: Zoji has built-in instant messaging. You can see when friends are online and IM them for a quick chat. The best part about this is that there is NO DOWNLOAD!

No Limits: My favorite aspect about Zoji is that you can upload pictures for friends and family to view. Contrary to other social networking sites, Zoji lets you upload full-sized original pictures so recipients can have high quality prints developed, putting an end to tiny, fuzzy, pixelated photos.

Friends: Zoji brings people together and keeps them busy with its various event planning tools. Zoji seems to be pretty cool.

Zoji is a combination of a couple different popular sites, and I think it can work in their best interests.

Check out Zoji.

While geared for Windows Live Spaces users, Live Writer also works with blogs like WordPress, Movable Type, LiveJournal and Blogger. I have never been fond of using blogging tools and always stuck with the WordPress admin panel.Once downloaded and installed, It was easily able to tell I had a WordPress setup and I logged in and downloaded the weblog style. If you use Internet Explorer, there is the option of installing a toolbar that adds blogging functionality, and that is convenient.

When you start Windows Live Writer up for the first time, it will show you a new, blank post ready in WYSIWYG format within your blog style. Live Writer has the basic features you need of any blogging utility from WYSIWYG tools and spell check to inserting maps from Windows Live Local. The post Properties bar is at the bottom so you can add keywords to the post, adjust the time stamp and add URLs to send trackbacks to. On the top right of the window you can select which categories to organize the post into and Windows Live Writer was able to find out which categories this blog had.

Exploring the preferences menu exposes even more features that make Windows Live Writer an awesome tool. You can click on the drop-down arrow for the Publish button and post the draft you are working on to your blog. That way, you can continue blogging from any computer and not risk losing the post if saved locally on your computer. If that is not a big problem for you, you can switch the viewing mode to Web Preview before posting to see what it looks like on your blog. You can also have Windows Live Writer automatically save drafts at intervals of your choice, automatically check spelling before publishing and ping servers you tell it to when posts are published.

Windows Live Write is a beta, so do not get too upset when you find some things are just plain hassles, such as not being able to work on two post at the same time; You’ll have to open another window. Perhaps one of these days, they will fix some of the annoyances. I am sure when you download the product, you’ll notice some of them.

Windows Live Writer has the features and capabilities of a program you would expect to see bundled in the next version of MS Office. Windows Live Writer really creates a well-rounded blogging experience and if you are big on blogging, like me, then this might be a good program to try out.

Windows Live Writer is Free and can be downloaded here.

You know that feeling you get when two of your favorite things have just been meshed together into an amazing combination? If so, you can imagine the effect Buzzword has had on me, being a writer and a Flash animator. This flash-based word processor is quickly becoming one of my favorite web applications.

In addition to being absolutely beautiful, Buzzword is ridiculously easy to use. Even people who don’t understand common icons could effortlessly process a document in Buzzword, because the name of each tool pops up when you mouse over an icon. And all the basic tools are there–insert tables, images, lists, comments, headers, or footers without searching through long menus. It does spell check, but it doesn’t have a word count tool or many fonts to choose from yet. Additionally, I’ve had some issues when it comes to using some of the tools (especially copy).

That aside, I’d say Buzzword is definitely a valuable tool. You can create your documents from any Javascript-enabled web browser with Flash Player 9 installed; PC or Mac. Plus, you can define the editing privileges of those you share it with by labeling them a reader, reviewer, or co-author. Best of all, Buzzword is a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) word processor, so you’ll know that everyone else will see the document exactly as they should.

Buzzword is a product of Virtual Ubiquity. While Buzzword can definitely match applications such as Google Docs, its lack of integration with other applications and services isn’t helping it gain any speed. Show Buzzword some love at preview.getbuzzword.com.