tools

2009’s top tech

Here’s a quick roundup of some things I’ve really started to get some use out of in 2009. Not necessarily services that were new to the last 12 months, but ones which became a vital part of my toolkit.

You’ll notice Google Wave isn’t on the list – for me, it’s still a great bit of tech in search of a problem to solve. The idea posited here, that it’s real value will be in the enterprise, is interesting.

Key things that come out of this list for me are:

  • For me to really love a service or application, it has to run nicely – preferably using a dedicated app – on the iPhone. It also needs to have a web interface, so I can access it using different computers.
  • I also prefer tools which interface nicely with the other things I use – silos for my information and content don’t really interest me.

1. Basecamp

Despite the fact that there are a lot of things about Huddle that I like more than Basecamp, I’ve found myself using the latter more and more in 2009. I think it is partially the email integration I like so much – the fact that people can take part in online discussions without having to leave their email client.

In 2010, though, I suspect that Huddle will break through into the government space, and that I’ll start using it a lot more. One reason for that will be the integration with Microsoft Office, which could be a real game changer.

Both Basecamp (unofficially) and Huddle now have iPhone apps, making them accessible in a usable format on the move.

2. Evernote

I have mentioned Evernote in a few posts before – it’s a very useful and clever little service. You create notebooks which contain note pages within them. All are synced in the cloud, so whether you access them via the desktop app, the iPhone app or the website, you can read and edit them wherever you are.

Great for storing quick notes, links to look up later, or even photos and audio notes. I use it a lot to jot down and develop ideas for blog posts.

3. Posterous and Tumblr

I’m going to cover these two in a dedicated post on ‘easy blogging’ soon. Both make it stupidly quick and easy to record content online. Both work brilliantly on mobile devices with apps (Tumblr) or excellent email integration (Posterous). Both seamlessly interact with other online services, like Flickr, Twitter and Facebook.

4. Mailchimp

If there is one technology that government really ought to be making better use o, then it’s email. Fine, lots of people moan about having too much of it, but given the option between getting an email or having to check a webpage, they’ll go for the addition to their inbox every time.

Email works on mobiles, is accessible and pretty much everyone knows what to do with it. Services like MailChimp – and there are others, like Campaign Monitor – make it easy to collect lists of email addresses and send messages out, tracking what people click on and how many people open the addresses.

I have a bigger post on email in the pipeline.

5. Yammer

Since joining the Learning Pool team, the problem of keeping communications working in a distributed workforce have become really apparent to me. But since we started using Yammer in a serious way across the company, those problems seem to have disappeared.

Yammer, for those that don’t know, is a Twitter-like service that is private for organisations. Authentication is based on your email address, so everyone on the same email domain can access that organisation’s Yammer stream.

It works really well, and the service is used for a true mixture of ‘what I’m doing today’ type updates, office banter, general messages and discussion. Kent County Council are also using Yammer to great effect – anyone else?

6. Skype

I’ve been using Skype for years, but never more than now. Part of that is for the same reason as for the use of Yammer – chatting to the Learning Pool guys, who are all heavy Skype users – but I’m now using it a lot to talk to family as well.

I’d put quite a bit of this down to hardware – all the computers in our house now have webcams built into them, which makes using services like Skype much easier and more effective.

7. Adium

Adium is a great little multi-protocol instant messaging client – which means that within the one application, I can chat to people using Google Talk, MSN, AIM, Yahoo! and Facebook.

Instant messaging is now something I use much more than before, and Adium makes that easy. IM is often seen as being a bit old hat these days, what with it being a fairly closed and usually one to one medium. But sometimes you need the immediacy, and, yes, the one to one-ness. These days more time seems to be spent communicating, which affects every medium.

8. Dropbox

I came to Dropbox late, but it is an awesome tool and probably the best cloud-based file storage solution. It adds a drive to your desktop computer, or your laptop, to which you can save files, which can then be retrieved on other machines via the web interface, or the iPhone app, or indeed the drive application if you have that installed elsewhere too.

Dropbox makes it a doddle for me to be able to access the files I am working on whether I am using my laptop or my desktop.

9. Delicious

I’ve been using it for years, but I’m starting to find more and more value in Delicious. Part of the reason is the huge number of links I now have in there, which I can access and search easily using the Firefox plugin, also the way it interfaces with other services, like the occasional blog post that pops up automatically here, to cross posting links to Twitter.

I’m also finding myself subscribing more and more to individual users’ accounts in Delicious, to see what they are bookmarking. It may seem rather old hat these days, but if you are interested in using the web as a learning tool, then social bookmarking is a vital part of the toolkit.

10. Wikipedia

There probably hasn’t been an hour that went by, when I was awake, during 2009 in which I didn’t refer to Wikipedia at some point. I’d never used it as a single source, or for any serious research (other than to follow up the links it references, perhaps) but to get the lowdown on a topic fast, it’s an astonishingly good resource.

I often mock it for its focus on tech and pop culture when I mention it in talks, but that is probably where I get most of my use out of it. Oracle want to buy Sun? What do Oracle actually do, anyway? Wikipedia make it dead easy to find out.

Contribute to DigitalMentor.org!

A few new pages have been created on the Digital Mentor wiki which are screaming out for content to be added, and it’s really easy to do so!

All you have to do to add to the wiki is click the ‘edit’ link on the relevant page, and then type in the site-wide password, which is printed on the top left of every page. No need to create an account, or think up a password to remember!

The pages that are open for contributions right now are:

  • What is a digital mentor? – Give your thoughts on what you see as being the important parts of the digital mentor role
  • Links – list where you have seen web pages and blog posts about digital mentors, or related stuff
  • Online tools – where have you seen online resources which could be used either by digital mentors, or by those mentoring the mentors?

If you don’t like using wikis, you can still contribute! Leave your thoughts in the comments here, or email them to me, and I will do the wiki bit.

10 different ways to post to your blog

One of the great about using a blog as a publishing platform is the flexibility of it. Every blog platform worth its salt has a editor built into it, a place online where you can type your stuff and hit ‘publish’ to get it out there onto the web. But there are many other ways of getting content onto your blog. Let’s have a look through them.

1. Built in editor

The is the boring standard one. For various reasons (see 2…) I spend most of my time in the default WordPress editor. It certainly has its advantages – as long as you are online you can access it from any computer, and you know your formatting shouldn’t come out screwy when you publish. In fact, the full screen option on the WordPress editor makes a tremendous difference: it’s a lot easier to write when you aren’t being distracted by all the other options!

The downsides are that it isn’t available (yet) when offline, meaning you have to start typing in something else, then copy and paste it across. I also often find myself feeling rushed when typing into a box on a webpage, even though I know my broadband is only there. I wonder if people who have come to the net relatively recently, and therefore weren’t exposesd to the horrors of pay-as-you-go dial-up, have these problems…

2. Desktop application

One of the other main ways to post to your blog is to use a dedicated blogging application. Yes, such things do exist. Essentially, these are like stripped down word processors, which allow you to do stuff like tag your posts, categorise them, add pictures etc, and then post directly to your blog by hitting a button.

There are a few reasons why you might like to use an application like this:

  • They work when you are offline: type up your blogposts on the train, then as soon as you get some wifi, you can publish them with one click
  • They help you take your time: for some reason using something other than a browser means I’m more relaxed about what I am writing
  • Sometimes they are just better: the interface on some of these applications is more intuitive and easy to use than what the blogging engines offer

So, if you want to try a desktop blog editor, where do you need to go?

Personally the best application of this type I have used is Microsoft’s Live Writer – praise indeed as I try and avoid MS stuff like the plague. I wish they did a Mac version…

3. Browser plugin

If you use a decent browser, like FireFox say, you’ll know that you can make it do some groovy extra things by installing plugins. There are some plugins which turn your browser into a blog editor – not the same as using the online web-based editor that comes with your blog, but extending the functionality of the browser itself. This means that they can work offline, if you want them to, but also that they integarte nicely with your browser, for instance making it an absolute doddle to link to webpages you currently have open, or by copying content from a webpage into your post.

Two example of FireFox plugins that act as blog editors are ScribeFire and Deepest Sender. I’d probably recommend the former, as it has quite an extensive user community, having emerged from the Performancing bloggers’ community.

Another alternative in this space is Flock. Flock is a browser in its own right, based on FireFox but with loads of extra features built in to help you interact with various social web services. Part of that is an inbuilt blog editor, which works rather nicely.

4. Flickr

If you want to quickly post your photos straight to your blog, you don’t have to write a post, embed the photo, and then hit publish. Oh no. Flickr can do all that for you. It takes the name of the photos to be the title of your blog post, the description becomes the text of the post and the photo is sorted for you too. All the details on how to do it are available on the Flickr site.

I’m sure other photo sharing sites do this too…

5. Delicious

Delicious is a social bookmarking site, allowing you to keep an online, public note of cool websites you have spotted. If you want to point these out to your blog readers too, you don’t have to laboriously copy and paste them over every day. Instead, you can configure your delicious account to send a daily posting to your blog with a bulleted list of the links you have bookmarked for that day. Nice one! Find out more here.

Even better, if you are a WordPress user, you can configure this posting to a much greater level by using the Postalicious plugin.

Again, I am sure this is possible with other social bookmarking sites, too.

6. Twitter

If you like, you can share all your ramblings on Twitter with your blog readers too. Well, you can if you blog with WordPress, using the TwitterTools plugin. Like the delicious one, this regurgitates your tweets on a daily basis into a list in a post on your blog. Do bear in mind that a lot of your readers will follow you on Twitter too, so you might be in danger of boring them witless with this.

7. Email

Most blog platforms allow you to send in posts via email. It can be a bit tricky to setup (it’s a nightmare in WordPress unless you use the Postie plugin), or in the case of Posterous, blogging via email is what it’s all about. Email blogging is a quick and easy way of blogging on the move, via a mobile phone, say. But if you are using a webmail interface on a computer, why not just load up your blog’s inbuilt editor?

8. Online word processor

Both Google Docs and Zoho allow you to send a document to a blog. So, if you are more comfortable using one of those tools than your blog’s editor, why not give this a try?

9. From Word

Apparently this is possible with Word 2007 for Windows. Quite a few people write their posts in Word before copy-and-pasting them across to their blog editors, so this at least cuts out the middle man, I suppose. No idea how well it works though.

10. Some other tenth thing

OK, OK so I am a pathetic fraud. I couldn’t think of a tenth option. Anyone else?

More cloud working stuff

I missed a couple of bits out of my recent post on stuff I am/will be using to work once I am self employed (not long to go now, folks!). Here’s a couple more:

Communications

Being at home alone more often will mean I need to have good communications links with other folk to help me keep on top of things as well as keep me sane. So, I have Skype which is as useful for instant messaging as it is calling people over the web. I’m davewbriggs on Skype, if you’d like to connect on there.

I also use Meebo, which in an in-the-browser instant messenger client which allows you to chat to people whether they use Microsoft, Google, AOL or Yahoo! instant messaging. Very useful! These days it’s also useful to keep an eye on Facebook chat, which seems to be becoming increasingly popular.

One communications medium I would like to make more is online video, both by using ‘webinar’ (ugh!) type services like DimDim and GoToMeeting and video conferencing like ooVoo. It would certainly be cool to be able to provide support or even coaching online using these sorts of methods.

Intranet

It might be a bit strange for what is effectively a one-man-band to have an intranet. I see it as another tool with which I can organise myself, though. I’m using a wiki I created with Google Sites, which makes use of several templates to create the functionality I need. Each bit of work I undertake has a page in the wiki, and an entry in a big to-do list. All the files for a project are attached to the relevant wiki page, which also lists everything I know about the project: who I am talking to about it, URLs etc so I can’t forget anything. It also means I have a record of completed projects that I can refer to easily. It seems to be working pretty well so far.

Working in the cloud

This rather mega post from Paul Stamatiou made me think about what I’m going to be using from September to manage myself and my business. Most of these I have been using for a while, or have just started to get set up.

Email

I use Gmail for my email, set up  to work with the DavePress.net domain through Google Apps. It works wonderfully, including being able to access it on my iPhone.

Calendar

I use iCal on my Mac, which syncs with the iPhone through MobileMe. Some people have had trouble with this service, but it works fine for me. MobileMe also means I have a web based version of the calendar should I need to give others access.

Documents

I have two types of documents, those that I am working on with others, and those which are pretty much just for me. The former I put on Google Docs, the latter I edit with Office 2008 on the Mac and save on my iDisk, which thanks to MobileMe is accessible from anywhere. All Docs I regularly back up on my hard drive.

I’m currently experimenting with how to plan work and time, with spreadsheets and calendars. Am sure I will figure it out soon.

Contacts

I have contacts in my phone, synced to the Mac and online with MobileMe. I’m also starting to fill out Zoho CRM, which is an online customer relationship management platform, running in the browser, which is free for up to three users. It’s a very comprehensive system, far too big for my purposes, really, but I am trying to find the bits of functionality I need and how I can make them work for me.

The Zoho suite of online apps is truly amazing, though I have to admit to never having got into them properly because there is simply too much of it!

Notes

Mixture of old and new media here. First port of call is my notebook; but second I go for Evernote which syncs between web, iPhone and Mac desktop application, including text, images and audio.

What’s important

So what I seem to need in the apps I use is mobility. I need to be able access as much of my stuff as I can in different locations, whether I have my own laptop with me or not – and even when I only have my phone with me.

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