Through the Phases

It’s weird looking back over the year and reflecting on how you’ve progressed as an individual.  2009 for me was one of improved productivity, due mainly to the use of a number of online/offline/soft/hard tools.  In this post I’ll highlight my top five:

1. The iPhone. As a colleague of mine put it ‘life is so much better through an iPhone’, and it’s absolutely true.  The connectivity allows you to keep up with so many different ongoing conversations and it empowers you to manage your online identity, accounts and presence in a way you’ve never before thought possible.
2. Google Docs. I personally think Google Docs is an amazing product.  I work in a team based across two different organisations with different IT infrastructure.  Google Docs provides our team with a shared space where we can work collaboratively on one document.  One of the best examples of it’s use is in the production of our team minutes.  We don’t have a lot of admin support so, guaranteed we have a connection to the internet, we can write the minutes online as we go.  Once the meeting is complete we simply archive that version as an issued document maintaining the online version as a constant Beta if you like.  It also means we can update the minutes prior to the meeting allowing for more discussion time.
3. WordPress. Although you won’t see many posts on this blog (after my re-invention) my team and the service I work for use WordPress to pass on information in an informal manner.  It’s worth pointing out our service relies on providing tried and tested good practice models, tools etc. to our user base.  Not everything is deemed ready to go on the main website and so wordpress is used to communicate any interesting information in a more informal manner via JISC Involve.
4. Diigo. I’m still finding my feet with Diigo but for me it’s the best social bookmarking tool I’ve come across.  It allows me to bookmark pages and add all the usual metadata, add comments to the pages I’ve bookmarked, share with a particular community, create lists, view lists as slideshows and much more.  If you haven’t tried Diigo I’d seriously suggest giving it a look.
5. Xmarks. Although I use Diigo to manage a range of bookmarks they tend to be research based.  For more day to day functionality I tend to maintain a standard set of bookmarks using my chosen browser.  Xmarks is a simple plugin that allows me to sync those bookmarks across any computer I’m using.

What’s your top five tools of 2009?