A few of my favorite (most useful) things

Will and I were having a conversation about Flickr and how awesome it is and it got me to thinking about all the new programs/technologies/applications that I enjoy that just make computing great (definitely magnified by the fact that I'm doing these things on a mac, but I'll save my favorite mac things for another time).

So, here goes (not necessarily in this order):

1. RSS Feeds

This is brilliant. Want to monitor 80 different news sites without having to check each individual one? Check. All your favorite blogs? Check. Newest Flickr photos? Check. Pollen trends for Atlanta? Yep, that too. In fact, these days I get irritated when a site doesn't offer an RSS feed. The other day I had to sign up for an email newsletter because a site I wanted (offering daily deals and tips) didn't have a feed. What a waste. But, monitoring feeds brings me to

2. Google Personalized Homepage

I have never really used an RSS reader. Before using Google, I used myyahoo. Google surpassed them. Who knows, maybe they're catching up, but so far I haven't had a reason to look back.

Email, news, craiglist, all my favorite blogs, flickr feeds and so much more. I monitor Reuters news, BBC news, Slate, huffingtonpost.com, dooce.com, flickr photos, del.icio.us feeds, Slashdot, digg and many many others. And now they're beginning to add more and more modules. It's awesome. I've actually had to read articles on how NOT to spend all your time in your rss reader. Because man is it easy to keep going back.

3. Blogging

What's a personalized homepage without a blog to monitor? A recent report on NPR said that there are thousands and thousands of blogs created every day. You can find just about anyone's perspective on just about anything. Not to mention keep up with friends. In my opinion, some of the best writing I read is done by bloggers.

4. Flickr

What's a blog without photos? I stumbled upon this over a year ago and it is awesome (back then it wasn't yet owned by yahoo...) It's extremely easy to upload photos and they can all be organized by tag or set or both. Flickr even records your camera data, the date you took it, the date you uploaded it, and many more. But what makes it so valuable beyond these features is the social aspect. No more emailing everyone the albums you've uploaded to *insert other service here.* You can comment on photos, mark them with notes, mark them as favorites, and save your friends to contacts so that you see their most recent every time. Better yet, all the photos are saved online, just in case.

5. Del.icio.us

What's one step beyond sharing photos? Social bookmarking. This is extremely useful and convenient. I discovered it through a link to Jen Lee's del.icio.us site (thanks Jen!) All of my bookmarks accesible everywhere, organized by tag. I also use this method to mark interesting articles for friends, which is really convenient since we just used to send emails full of links. Now I just monitor their del.icio.us feed of items tagged with my name.

6. Podcasts

I wasn't very big into podcasting initially, especially since I'm really bad about plugging my ipod in to update it (a dock might be useful for this purpose). However, recently NPR started offering more podcasts, specifically of their show Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, which I think is some of the best stuff on radio. I have since added about a gazillion more podcasts on my computer at work, which I listen to throughout the day.

7. Awesome websites

There are just a few websites that I particularly enjoy (that I feed to my homepage, of course), that I think are just either useful or cool or both.

wikipedia - who doesn't love it?

digg - you can really find some interesting stuff here

del.icio.us/popular - what everyone on del.icio.us is tagging

43folders.com - many useful tips for productivity, geared towards mac users

lifehacker.com - useful tips and info about anything you can imagine

craigslist - I'm going to find my mountain bike here

listible - want to know the top 10 of something? go here

NPR - need i say more?

Slate - gotta love it

BBC news - usually covers news about stuff here better than the news people here

macosxhints - because i'm obsessed with getting the most out of Snow White (this is just one of the many feeds i have regarding hints, software, and news about macs)

Media Matters for America - ever wonder how much mass media sucks or how wrong those people on tv are? here ya go