2009 In Review Part 1: 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 http://vicchi.posterous.com/ and this auto feeds into my main WordPress driven blog at http://www.vicchi.org/. 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 http://www.vicchi.org/, my work blog at http://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 http://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

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

Another Piece Of Bloggage By Gary

Self professed "geek with a life", geo-blogger, geo-talker and geo-tweeter, Gary works in London and Berlin as Director of the Places Registry for Nokia; he's a co-founder of WhereCamp EU, the chair of w3gconf and sits on the W3C POI Working Group and the UK Location User Group. A contributor to the Mapstraction mapping API, Gary speaks and presents at a wide range of conferences and events including Where 2.0, State of the Map, AGI GeoCommunity, Geo-Loco, Social-Loco, GeoMob, the BCS GeoSpatial SG and LocBiz. Writing as regularly as possible on location, place, maps and other facets of geography, Gary blogs at www.vicchi.org and tweets as @vicchi.

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Other bloggage that may or may not be geo-related to this one:

1. 2009 In Review Part 2: Organisations

   In an earlier post, I wrote about the gadgets that made 2009; now it’s time to look at the organisations and by strange coincidence, as there were 3 gadgets, so...

2. 2009 In Review Part 3: People

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3. In the Spirit of Experimentation, Part 2

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4. A Posterous Wish List

   I’ve been using Posterous for a while now, a quick trawl back through the archives shows the first post I wrote via the service was in August 2009, and I’ve been using...

5. Insomnia. Again.

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