As formal as Address sounds, it’s not meant to be. Just a small reminder that we are still here, more exemplified perhaps by the inverted correlation between blogging and doing great things (P.S. Many of us can be followed on Twitter, which doesn’t appear to have that problem).

Yes, we have all been busy doing things like moving to different countries and continents, starting companies, starting and changing jobs. I think Cecil is even well on his way to becoming a e2.0 authority, and judging by Fidji Simo’s tweets, I think she’s developing herself into an expert in retail—on-, off-, and hybrid forms. And that is amazing news and exactly what I always wanted from Tech IT Easy—a “workforce” that is productive outside of Tech IT Easy and contributes to its members’ lives on- and offline as well.

Which is why I still encourage anyone interested in technology and its commercialisation to join us, to develop and contribute their thoughts and expertise!

All that aside, what more can I wish for our readers and bloggers on this Christmas day? For one, I wish for a better 2010 and I am 100% certain that it will be. We all got a little roughed up in 2009, but what doesn’t kill us only makes us stronger! The Internet Boom & Bust… pah, I laugh at its impact: it lead to Le infamous nouveau Web, aka Web 2.0, aka the one where 37Signals had to remind us of the revolutionary idea of charging $$$ for products. I also laugh at Enron, as all its promised consequences of accountability haven’t affected the upper-tier of management one bit (and maybe never will).

But I don’t laugh at what is happening today, I’m happy about it. Between the magnificent state’ification of banks, the “new/old” lean approach to doing all business, and the threat of global warming, it’s another warning shot at us, the complacent human race who thought they had it all under control again. The world isn’t perfect and I hope that every one of those bumps bring us closer to making it better.

All cynicism aside, we live in a time where information is at our fingertips, where collaborative filtering and neuroscience help us better filter the relevant stuff to the top, where we can still publish news at a click, which is still an amazing concept, and where we all have GPS in our hands today, and augmented reality in our hands tomorrow. Yay, the innovative mind and yay, it’s practical outcomes!

Merry Christmas everyone and if you don’t hear from us before the 31st of December, have a great transition into the new year!

Love,

Your Tech IT Easy team:
Alex, Jeremy, Steve, Fidji, Georgia, Cecil, Vincent, Kari, Manu, Lucien, Matthias, Raj, Raphael, and Remy

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I’m going to be a little unoriginal and echo Michael Arrington with this post here, where I generate a list of my main web tools for 2009. My list is actually a lot shorter than his—for one, I’m not that “social” and also still seem to be hooked on working through desktop apps on my Mac.

The list:

• Twitter is still hard to define for other people that ask me about it. I don’t use it as a chat-client much, rather I use it as a push-mechanism, that aggregates all links from my blogs and bookmarks, as well as some micro-thoughts.
• FriendFeed is more of a chat-client for me, I like the centralised comment interface, love the rooms, and also use it to feed all content to it. It’s also a big source of news for me, while I read Twitter less and less (except for those people I pulled into FriendFeed, of course).
• Delicious is mainly for bookmarks that I can use through the great Firefox extension, but I also feed the ‘techiteasy’ tag to the @techiteasy channel on twitter for instance. A secondary bookmarking system is Netvibes and FriendFeed likes.
• Netvibes is my rss-reader of choice, because it isn’t linear like Google reader and allows me to get a quick overview of what’s playing in the world. I also use it to read my mails and have twitter, friendfeed, facebook, etc. clients embedded in widgets.
• Facebook is my address book for friends, a tool I use to arrange meetings, and to check what’s going on in the lives of people that are close to me. I rarely use apps on it, except for a birthday calendar one.
• Gmail is a reliable mail-client, period, and one I use as a backbone for even my own domain-mail.
• Wordpress is Tech IT Easy. I personally never use its dashboard, preferring to compose posts in Marsedit for the Mac.
• Blogger is all of my other blogs (at the moment 2, previously around 4) and a very reliable service that doesn’t annoy me with script-blocking or similar. Some would call it blogging for kids, of course, but I don’t mind. I see it more as the gmail-version of blogs.
• Picasa is the backbone for publishing pictures on blogger, I don’t really do web-based picture collections anymore, except through Facebook.
• Google.com, I nearly forgot. It is, next to netvibes, the most visited website for me and essentially what connects me to every website out there.
• I’d like to list a list of news sites, unfortunately I feel that rss and Twitter/Friendfeed have commoditised the idea of news sites and severely restricted my loyalty to only a few aggregators and sites, including BBC news, Techmeme (less and less), and Hacker News (more and more).

The following list consists of tools that I use online, but much more infrequently.

• Last.fm and favtape.com for music
• Tinyurl for rickrollling people
• Printwhatyoulike.com for ink-efficient printing
• Google docs, mostly for designing surveys, though the paid version of surveymonkey.com is much better
• Youtube and Google Video, for music-videos mostly
• Translate.google.com, a very handy tool to translate websites and the occasional work-doc.
• Twitterkeys for talking like this: The ♨ of success does not always = ✌, ♥, and ☯
• Search.twitter.com, mostly for finding out who said something about @vincentvw.

What are some of your favourite tools for 2009 and why do you use them?

Vincent

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