TOP 10 TOOLS 2007, 2008 & 2009
Harold Jarche

Harold is an independent consultant based in Atlantic Canada. His work is centered on improving organisational performance.  Harold blogs at jarche.com and tweets at @hjarche.  Harold is also part of the togetherLearn brain trust.

Harold's Top 10 Tools as at 28 September 2009

1. Twitter: A performance support tool, learning platform and social network all rolled in one. I learn so much from Twitter that I write a weekly blog post on what I've found, called Friday's Finds.

2. is.gd: Being limited to 140 characters on Twitter requires URL shorteners and is.gd is fast and simple, plus it doesn't send people to a separate preview page.

3. Wordpress: I still use this open source software to run my blog and it keeps getting better. Wordpress.com's hosted service also lets me run about a dozen other blogs or test out services at a low cost.

4. Slideshare: A simple way to share slide presentations and works with Mac and Windows applications. The embed function for blogs is a handy way to share and lest you view a presentation without having to download it.

5. Keynote: Apple's presentation system simply lets you create better designed presentations.

6. Flickr: I upload many of my pictures to Flickr and have a Pro account. This robust system also offers a Creative Commons search function and the Flickr Commons of public photos from various archives.

7. Neo Office: When I switched to a Mac last year I also switched from Open Office to Neo Office, an open source office suite that lets me open and save documents in a wide variety of formats.

8. Delicious: This is still the standard for saving and sharing online bookmarks.

9. GMail: I route all of my mail through GMail because of its excellent spam filtering and it provides me with a free mail backup system.

10. Google Reader: This year I switched from Bloglines to Google Reader, which has less down time and connects with other Google applications.

Harold's Top 10 Tools as at 6 March 2008 and 27 July 2007

1. Thunderbird - This is a simple e-mail client that focuses on e-mail, though you can use it as a desktop RSS feed reader as well. Virtually virus-free and easy on memory. Like FireFox you can easily change the look.

2. OpenOffice - 've been using the free and open source OpenOffice for so long that I don't remember the other office suites. It saves in multiple formats, including MS .doc, .xls and .ppt, and exports to Flash or PDF with a single click

3. Google Docs & Spreadsheets - As much as I like OpenOffice, Google's collaborative documents and spreadsheets are excellent for group work. With Google's simple interface, it's not difficult to get new users to join in.

4. GIMP - Another free and open source tool that lets me edit photos.

5. Gliffy - This free online diagramming tool is getting better every day, with more templates and the ability to collaborate

6. MindMeister - Similar to Gliffy, but focused on mind maps. These two free tools have replaced my desktop applications like Visio or SmartDraw.

7. WordPress - Without my blog, I would not have been asked for a top ten tool list. WordPress is easy to use and has kept hundreds of thousands of spam from my website.

8. del.icio.us - I have played with several social bookmark tools and have settled on del.icio.us for my online, searchable database that forms part of my Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) system

9. Bloglines - I've been using Bloglines as my web RSS feed reader for several years and I still like it, in spite of the dozens of other options. It's simple and easy to view the +/- 150 feeds that I read.

10. Commentful - This is another tool from Blogflux that allows you to monitor the comments made on other blogs and notifies you of new comments. It integrates well with the Firefox browser.