Periodic Fable

1. My HTC TyTN II

OK, so it’s hardware, but it enables me to be part of the mobile social Web: I can check email, read my RSS feed, use Twitter and surf the Web for information whenever I want, wherever I am.

2. WordPress

Having a blog (or blogs) is essential to take part in the huge conversation that is the blogosphere, and to follow up and give your own spin on current trends and topics of interest. WordPress is my favourite blogging tool. It has some great features and is perfectly adequate to base one’s whole website on – especially for an individual or small business. I recently converted Reach Further’s 6-year-old e-learning blog, Periodic Fable, from Blogger into WordPress.

3. Drupal

Drupal is a ‘quick’ way to create websites with lots of social features. As it is open source software, there is a helpful user community to get you going and you can choose from a variety of commercially supported options if you want a really “instant” solution.

4. Wrike

Wrike is a to do list and project management tool on the Web. It’s part of Reach Further’s “cloud”. Reasons why we adopted Wrike: we can copy Wrike in on our emails and automatically create a task in the appropriate category – and then it sends you a handy “to do” list every morning! All staff in our small consultancy can assign one another tasks, and keep track of our own and others’.

5. Twitter

I’ve posted before and will post again about Twitter. A kind of miniblogging application based around what used to be known as status messages, each message you post or read is limited to 140 characters. Via Twitter I can keep up to date with what lots of people are doing in my area (elearning, community and social media): the links and comments people post and the conversations we all have are invaluable.

6. Twitter tools

There are a lot of tools now available to help you get the most out of Twitter. Some I have tried this year include: BeTwittered (putting Twitter in my iGoogle page), Tweetlater (to schedule tweets and automate follow tasks), LoudTwitter (putting tweets in a blog) and Twitterfeed.

7. Yammer

Like Twitter, Yammer is a micro-messaging/status indicator application but it is based around a particular email domain, and is private, so you can communicate within a company or organisation

8. Google Reader

An RSS reader is another essential to keep up with the buzz. I probably subscribe to far too many RSS feeds from blogs and other sources, but scanning through them in Google reader, especially on my TyTN, is another great way to keep myself up to date.

9 Ning

I’ve been using Ning for the ELESIG community I run – bringing together academics, practitioners and researchers interested in evaluating the learner experience. It is free – but not open source. As an element of a distributed network it works very well. There are other free social networking solutions available – people are saying good things about wetpaint, which started out as a wiki but has grown into a complete (albeit wiki-based) social solution on the SaaS model.

10. The community

What’s most important, of course, in social media is the community of people who use it. It wouldn’t be much use following people on Twitter or via RSS if they weren’t saying interesting and useful things. One’s business practice can be changed overnight by reading about someone’s discovery or inspiration. Thanks, everyone!

Originally published at reachfurther.com