i’ve spent soooo much time on the computer this year (an embarrassing amount, really), some fruitful, some not-so-much. … here’s my own personal “techie roundup of 2005″. some of these are now so popular as to be ubiquitous, but if they were new to me in the past year, they qualify. that’s the beauty of owning your own site – accountability goes out the window, and everything is at my sole discretion, like it or lump it.

things i found and loved this year:

wordpress - since I made the leap, it’s made me a smarter, better blogger, by far. they’re now starting their own hosting… which annoys me a little, since there was a certain amount of cachet to d.i.y. blogging (as opposed to simple plug-n-play sites), and even earlier this year when this site was completely self-created, without the use of templates or plugins, as awkward as it sometimes was, i was still inordinately proud of it. in any case, i feel like i’ve learned a lot more than i ever anticipated.

firefox and greasemonkey have combined to change my internet life. i suffer advertising, spyware and crashes no longer. three cheers for live bookmarks. hurrah for tabbed browsing.

lifehacker and ask.metafilter – for my money, easily the most useful sites on the web. most people already know about them, but they are the first sites i go to daily.

webjay and pandora - cool places for browsing new music by referencing stuff you already like.

ipod - in the few days i’ve had mine, i’ve put music, podcasts, tube maps, ebooks, photos, and videos on it. i can put whole movies on there. what a revelation.

trends I thought were overrated:

del.icio.us – i have my bookmarks here, and it’s better than google for boredom, but i find that it’s too much information, not enough filtering. when you can have thousands of bookmarks at your fingertips, you tend to become indiscriminate. and really, not everything is worth bookmarking. my *real* bookmarks are a select set of about 100, and many of them are resources i consider too precious to share with just anyone.

also, tags (technorati or otherwise). since everyone applies their own tagging rules, i fail to see how it’s very much different from searching by keyword. they *are* good for drawing site traffic though.

flickr - i am just very wary of entrusting my photos to a service which may or may not be there tomorrow, or decide to start charging/stop hosting/begin tracking. if you want to make sure you keep photos you care about, host them yourself and make sure you back up. and the vast majority of the stuff on there is shit anyway. i’m rarely interested in photos taken by people i know, let alone the horrible snapshots of strangers. not to mention the stupid “tagging” thing again. try looking for photos of the 7th july bombing and you’ll see why it’s just so non-sensical. it’s everyone doing their own thing – just putting the word “tagging” on it doesn’t make it any more user friendly.

itunes – i’m still not crazy about it, and i have a feeling i never will be. but i do enjoy finding new podcasts, so that’s fun.

those are the highs and lows as I see them. i’m sure there’s lots of stuff i’m overlooking – feel free to make recommendations!

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technology, websites, applications, best of 2005, year in review