2009 In Review Part 1: Gadgets
As the end of 2009 and of the decade of the noughties approaches rapidly, I thought it worthwhile to look back over the previous 12 months and give credit where credit is due or overdue. So let's start with gadgets.Not one but three. 
Firstly there's Posterous. Can a web service be a gadget? I think so. According to Wikipedia, gadgets "are invariably considered to be more unusually or cleverly designed than normal technological objects at the time of their invention".So, Posterous. Yes it's a blog creation tool but it's a simple, fiendishly simple blog creation tool. Nothing more than an email to post@posterous.com and you're done. It's how I wrote and posted this post. You focus more on the act of what you're writing, or the photo you've just taken, than on the mechanism where the post is formatted and uploaded. My posterous blog is https://vicchi.posterous.com/ and this auto feeds into my main WordPress driven blog at /.
Add in the other services that Posterous can update and some WordPress plugins and by the mere act of sending a mail, I post to Posterous, to my self hosted WordPress blog which in turn notifies Twitter and Facebook. Phew.
The second gadget is still my iPhone. Forget the controversy over the appstore approvals process, forget the appalling coverage that O2 provides here in the UK and focus instead on the fact that just as Posterous has pretty much revolutionised the way I blog, the iPhone has revolutionised the way in which I interact with the internet, where ever I am. Well, at least where ever I have coverage and I'm not being fleeced for international roaming charges that is.
The final gadget is YQL. The Yahoo! Query Language. This simple, easy, free, web service allows me to pull in feeds from my blog at /, my work blog at https://www.ygeoblog.com/, my decks on Slideshare, my photos on Flickr, my bookmarks on delicious and a whole slew of other sources and produce the dynamically updated vanity site of https://www.garygale.com/. All this through a single SQL-a-like select statement, some PHP and the Yahoo! User Interface library. Phew (again).
Coming up later today is Part 2: Organisations ...
Photo credits: PurpleLime, Sam Doidge and Studio Ego on Flickr
