1. Simon’s list of ten simple Google search tips from April. He added nine more tips in May, which also made the list of top posts.
2. Aliza’s suggestions for things that do and don’t work on Facebook pages from May.
3. Amber’s 12-step program for increased productivity that we published in February.
4. The April discussion from Simon about why open standards matter.
5. Aliza’s list of ten apps we can’t do without from April.
6. Aliza’s February discussion of significant developments in social media.
7. Doriano’s list of ten free add-ons for Google Apps from January.
8. A discussion of what our email signatures reveal about us, written by guest blogger Dave Clarke in June.
9. Darrell’s June list of apps that made him change his mind about using the iPad for work.
10. Dawn’s September list of tips for getting the most from Google Reader.

It’s clear you like our compilations of tips, apps, and other tools, but you also appreciate practical discussions of ways to improve your ability to work effectively. We thank you reading, and for the comments and suggestions you add to these posts; our blog is much stronger with your feedback.

Everyone here wishes you a successful, prosperous, exciting, challenging, fulfilling, and happy new year!

What were your favorite WWD articles from 2010? What would you like us to write about in 2011?

Image by sxc.hu user miamiamia

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• Enabling the Web Work Revolution
• Social Media in the Enterprise
• Are You Empowering Your Mobile Workforce?

Coming to San Francisco on October 4th, CrowdConf is the first conference centered around the emerging field of crowdsourcing and the future of distributed work, discussing the flattening of the global labor market.

Confirmed speakers include:

• Sharon Chirella, VP Amazon Mechanical Turk
• Tim Ferriss, Author, The 4-Hour Work Week
• David Alan Grier, Author, When Computers Were Human
• Barney Pell, Partner, Strategist, and Evangelist, Microsoft
• Maynard Webb, CEO, LiveOps
• Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law and Computer Science, Harvard

Early bird tickets cost $350 and are available until September 13th.

Photo by Flickr user nccarf_au, licensed under CC 2.0

More recently, we released the GigaOM iPhone App, which aggregates all the major content from our network, and what we found was that users are spending huge amounts of time reading content…much, more time than on our separate websites. Om touches on this more:

Little did we know how that app would change everything. It brought home a series of lessons about how people view and interact with our content. One of the biggest lessons of the iPhone app was the extremely high amount of time users spent per session, thanks to us unifying the content from all our sister sites into a single stream. It made us realize one basic fact: the readers appreciated the diversity, depth and deftness of our content, regardless of which network blog it came from. On an average, those who use our iPhone app spend over 15 minutes per session, with a couple of sessions daily. And that is with all the notifications turned off.

So, this evening we’re launching another redesign of all the network sites to bring them under one unified “GigaOM” experience. From a pure design perspective, it’s not a major visual change, but the navigation across all of the sites is a pretty significant change. This change will surface content from the entire network much more efficiently, and ideally, introduce you to new content that you otherwise may have missed.

TheAppleBlog’s content will not change. We’ll continue to bring you the same news, walkthroughs and real-life application that you enjoy. The places where you consume our content won’t change either. As a reminder, here are all the ways, in addition to the site, that you can find us:

• RSS
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Newsletter

We hope you dig the new changes! Let us know what you think below in the comments.

Why are we doing this? There are many reasons, but the key ones are:

• Improved user experience. It’s probably fair to say that the performance of webworkerdaily.com has been extremely sluggish recently. The performance of the new site will be much better, improving the experience for our readers. It should also be much easier to navigate.
• Increased exposure of our content. There is a ton of great technology content from some terrific writers on the network, much of which you probably don’t get to see even though it might be interesting to you. We’re redesigning the navigation and the organization of the network so that we we can introduce our readers to some of the great stories from our other sites. On the flip side of the coin, it should also mean introducing WebWorkerDaily’s content to a much wider audience.

At some point soon we’ll have a new URL structure to go with the updated design. It’s important to point out that this doesn’t mean that our content or writers will change. We’ll still be publishing the posts that you come here to read, and you can still subscribe to our email newsletter, RSS feed, our Facebook page and our Twitter feed, which will all function exactly as they did before. The difference is that we’ll also be able to introduce you to more of the content from around the network that we think you’ll find interesting, too. The new design and backend should give us a way to showcase content from across all blogs, with each site picking out the pieces that meets the needs of its unique set of readers; the objective is to give you a more frequently updated and well-rounded view of the world of tech.

Any problems with the new design? Let us know in the comments.

Chef is part of a new generation of IT.

Opscode, a two-year-old startup based in Seattle, has raised $11 million from Battery Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson in its second round of funding. The company, co-founded and led by former Amazon Master of Disaster Jesse Robbins, offers a software as a service aimed at helping developers configure and manage their servers.

Opscode was created to offer a hosted version of the Chef open-source configuration management software. Several of Opscode’s founders helped develop the Chef software, which allows developers to write code that will manage their servers, eliminating the need to write specific commands for each server or virtual machine. The resulting service is more flexible, and turns the act of configuring hardware into a task developers can write into their applications.

IBM’s Tivoli, HP’s Opsware and BMC Software offer configuration tools that attempt to first map a customer’s infrastructure, then give it instructions — an operational perspective vs. Opscode’s developer perspective. Opscode is already hosting the configuration management software for customers such as Rdio, the new music service from the Skype founders; GoTime, an iPhone application; and Etsy. Notably, companies such as Rackspace, Rightscale and VMware are big contributors to the Chef source code.

As a business Opscode has a solid team, good investors and paying customers, but what’s really noteworthy is how the development of Chef represents a generational shift in information technology. Many technologists, be they in hardware, programming, databases or services, are willing to accept a greater level of uncertainty or hosted services provided by others in their work.

At the hardware level it’s a willingness to architect for uncertainty and expect failure of the underlying servers or storage drives, as exemplified by Google. For data stores it’s a willingness to give up on synchronous writes and consistent persistence accepted by those working on NoSQL data stores. In programming the rise of millions of programmers choosing Ruby on Rails, Python or PHP over older languages like .Net or Java showcase the trend.

Opscode, which accepts that sometimes just looking for the things you need when you need them is an easier way to handle configuration management than needing to know where everything is in case you need them, is another example. With $11 million more, and a number of customers that are also growing their businesses, we’ll see if Opscode’s methods are a necessary evolution or a footnote in IT history. For more on this evolution, come to our Structure 2010 conference this Wednesday and Thursday in San Francisco.

We’ll be providing text and photo updates both before and during the event to see if any of our predictions came true.

The keynote will start on Monday, June 7 at 10 a.m. PST and we’ll be starting our coverage an hour or so before.

You can tune in via live.theappleblog.com and via our Twitter account: @theappleblog

Be sure to signup for a reminder of when coverage starts.

In this TechUniversity Keynote Transitions & Effects screencast (subscription required), we’ll walk you through creating transitions and effects in Keynote.

View full Keynote Transitions & Effects screencast on TechUniversity (subscription required)

Screencast Sample

So after four months of development and production, I’m very proud to announce the launch of TechUniversity.

TechUniversity is a video tutorial and screencast site dedicated to teaching you how to use your Mac and Apple products better. We’re launching with close to two dozen screencasts and will be adding new videos every week. You can watch the videos directly on the site or download high-quality, DRM-free videos with chapter markers. And to get your feet wet, you can check out a few free episodes in the Freebies section.

To view all the videos and access the downloads, you pay a small monthly fee of $4.95 (or $49.95 for a year). Being a subscriber also lets you interact with the screencast authors and other community members.

For those new to the Mac, I suggest checking out our 101 Series.

So, check out TechUniversity and let us know what you think! We’re extremely proud of this and would love for you to be a part of it!

I’m a programmer who decided somewhere along the way that he could write words as well as code. After much study, I’ve determined that English isn’t so different from C or Java. The punctuation’s a little different — code has more semicolons — but it’s all just storytelling. English uses words; code uses bits. There’s more of each in the other than you think.

Well…that’s true of most writing. But the topic of my first article for TheAppleBlog is myself, which is unfortunate because myself is my least favorite topic. Seriously, what do you say when you have 500 words to impress the world? I’m tempted just to post my resume and have done with it, but I won’t. I’m not sure what I’d do with the other 493 words, anyway. (“I’m awesome and you should hire me.” has turned out to be a surprisingly effective Curriculum Vitae.)

Instead, I’ll just let you know that I’m a software developer, with experience developing software for Fortune 10 companies, startups, nonprofits, and many things in between. At some point during all that software development, I also found time to go back to school for a graduate business degree from the University of Texas at Austin, which was an experience that I am still recovering from. I used that degree as an excuse to go on sabbatical from software to manage investments for a large seed-stage Venture Capital fund in Austin, Texas, where I live, and I very much enjoyed looking at startups from both sides of all kinds of tables while I was there. But now I’m back in software, so no, I can’t help your company get funding. Sorry. But I’m sure your company’s really cool, though.

It’s also worth mentioning that I’m a big-time Apple nerd. I’m typing this on my 17″ MBP, which is currently backing up to my Time Capsule, which is in turn busy keeping its friend, my iMac, nice and warm. And without my precious iPhone, what would I compulsively check my pockets for every time I stand up? And that iPad-shaped hole on my bookshelf needs filling badly.

Since I’m a developer, one of my favorite things to write about is software. (Yes, I’m incredibly fun at parties, thanks.) So, I’ll be writing a lot of how-tos about things like iPhone apps and how to make your iPhone do things it is and isn’t generally supposed to do. (As a rule, I’ll also post source code for my how-tos, which will hopefully be useful to TAB readers.) Since I’m a geek, I’ll also be writing about how to integrate the iPhone SDK with other things you use on a daily basis, like Twitter and Facebook. And since I’m an opinionated geek who likes to play businessman, I’ll also be speculating about what on earth Apple and friends are doing and why it’s smart or stupid.

Anyway, I am thrilled to be joining the incredible TAB team and getting to meet and greet with other Apple fans. If you just can’t get enough of my writing (heh), then you can find more on my blog, or just follow my stream of consciousness. Please do say “hello” if you stop in!

I’ll start off by letting you know that I hail from The Emerald City (yeah that’s Seattle). Most folks think we are an unassuming bunch who drink too much coffee while working on our Windows PC’s. While I do like a good a mocha, I’m also part of Seattle’s growing Mac community that’s building some pretty cool stuff for the iPhone and iPod touch.

As a self-described geek and software engineer I’ll be writing articles to help unravel the mystery of developing apps for iPhone OS. In addition to writing code, I’ll examine various aspects of the software development process including planning, testing and design. If you’re planning the next great app hopefully I can provide the “secret sauce” to help move your concept from idea to the App Store.

Don’t think coding is for you? Even if you are a project manager, sales person or business type, learning about the technology that has captured world attention may prove useful to your company or career.

My Background

I’ve spent my entire career in software development, with a primary focus on building web-based applications. Over the years I’ve worked in project management, coding, database development and quality assurance. I also ran my own software consulting company for 5 years.

In 2009 I took notice of iPhone OS as a legitimate development platform when Apple announced they had 50,000 apps in its app store. Like many iPhone developers I’d spent most of my career immersed in other technologies so I spent many months learning a new set of tools, processes and programming language.

This past year I released my first iPhone app called Jingle! that integrates music and social media. I also have an interest in education, mapping and GPS systems and plan to develop new titles for the iPad.

In 2003, I attended my first Macworld and attended every expo from NYC, Boston and San Francisco until the most recent MWSF in January. I became a total conference junkie and even found myself at CES and Photoshop World finally earning the grand invitation and attending Apple Town Hall events and WWDC as press. All the while, I was a lone blogger with a passion for spreading the word about Apple and its products.

Today, at the ripe old age of 23 I’ve seen Steve Jobs speak nearly 30 times, have written over 5,000 articles and reviews about Apple and was even interviewed in the movie MacHeads which premiered last year. It’s safe to say that I am a Mac head and I’m happy to be joining the TAB team as a contributor among the ranks great writers like Darrell Etherington, Charles Jade and Nick Santilli.

I enjoy writing editorials that excite readers and inspire others to give their thoughts. When I’m not writing, I enjoy taking photographs, tweeting and blogging about food & life.

photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

Geoffrey L. Goetz

An overwhelming feeling of “Jamais Vu” is how I would best describe the experience of re-entering both the mobile as well as the development scenes since the advent of Apple’s iPhone SDK.  Ground breaking new technology, ever-expanding features and capabilities in each new SDK.  Innovative and hip company in Silicon Valley calling all the shots. And like a moth to a flame I just have to be there no matter what. Writing about it, speaking about it, teaching, mentoring, and building solutions with it.

That was me in a nutshell back in 1997 when Java took off and Borland was the hip company in Silicon Valley (actually Scott’s Valley, on the other side of the mountain, but close enough) that I could not help but fall in love with.  Everything then feels like everything now, and is best described in Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm.

I may have cut my teeth on a Commodore in grade school, but Apple has been the dominate computing platform throughout my education.  Upon entering the corporate world, it was all Mainframe, Unix, Microsoft and even OS/2.  Then with Java and the JBuilder IDE from Borland, I slowly started to re-enter the Apple platform professionally.  I now live in a completely Mac household, work day in and day out solely on Macs, developing applications for the iPhone and other mobile platforms.

At home, I fancy myself an amateur photographer with a decent array of prosumer Canon products.  I take on average 25K photos annually and spend a good amount of time organizing, printing and getting creative with the image library I have managed to create.  The subjects in the majority of the photos I take are my two children, who are also growing up Mac.  My now six-year-old received her first iMac at the age of three, and my two-year old is perfectly at home watching his favorite YouTube videos of trains and race cars on either the iPhone or iPad.

So what has changed?  Why are things different now compared to then?  I wish I knew exactly, it just feels very different somehow.  Hopefully blogging about it will help me figure it out.

Google launched a new feature for Google Buzz today that makes it easier for web site publishers — including GigaOM — to add a button to their content so that users can directly share it on the Gmail-based social network. We and others came up with a way to do the same thing after the service first launched in February, but it was a kind of a hack, which involved using Google Reader as a way to funnel the blog post through to Buzz. Not only was it a workaround, but it didn’t work for people without Google Reader accounts. Now there’s an official way to do the same thing, and GigaOM is one of the first sites to implement it, along with a number of other publishers including The Washington Post, YouTube and The Huffington Post.

Google Buzz has gotten its share of criticisms since it launched in February, including those centered around privacy concerns — which the service quickly responded to with a series of changes — and some complaints (including some from me) that it was confusing and difficult to use. And it’s not clear how much the service has been growing, since Google hasn’t provided any numbers after saying “millions of users” had tried it out following the launch. Even the Google Buzz team doesn’t seem to have been using it that much lately.

However, part of the reason why people haven’t been using the service more could be that it hasn’t been that easy to post content, something Google has acknowledged in its blog post about the new buttons. Hopefully this new feature will simplify the process, and help readers share content — including ours. If you want to add a Google Buzz button to your own site, you can grab the code to do that here.

My second Apple device was an iPod touch, also a second-gen and also a revelation; interacting with a touchscreen was completely new to me, and iPhone OS was a dream to use.

After owning those two, I got interested in OS X. I learned everything I could about Macs, watched every video I could find, and played with the Macs at the local Haddock store (Wichita doesn’t have an Apple store yet). I wanted to use OS X, so much so that I couldn’t wait to scrounge up the money to buy a Mac; I had to use it now. And so I hackintosh’d my crappy Dell Inspiron 1525 using a guide I found on DailyBlogged.com. Later, I’d end up writing for DailyBlogged, posting how-tos and opinion pieces.

Using a hackintosh was OK, but I still wanted a real Mac. Eventually, I made enough money to buy the unibody MacBook Pro I’m typing this on. Fast-forward a few months and here I am.

When I’m not using OS X, I’m using its cousin, Linux. There was a time when I used Windows, but those days are long gone. The only time I see Windows now is in VMWare.

If you’re interested, you can keep up with me through Twitter or my personal blog.

(PS: Yes, I’ve trimmed my beard since that picture was taken.)

TheAppleBlog joined GigaOM back in September 2008 but for the past 18 months we kept our pre-GigaOm design. This was the last step in fully integrating TheAppleBlog as part of the GigaOM family.

The new design helps us do a better job of featuring new content as well as letting you explore popular topics a lot more easily. In addition, we’ll be able to feature relevant content from around our network more easily.

At the end of the day, this redesign is about surfacing content for you and helping you interact with our little community more. There are a lot of intricacies and small features spread out around the site, so be sure to dig around. It’s definitely a dynamic new site with lots of extras that aren’t necessarily immediately obvious.

So have a look around and let us know what you think!

• Yes, I do look small in that photo. That’s because I’m only 16 (and the photo has been resized).
• In regard to #1, I know more than you might expect about computing*.
• I write from my house which is tucked away in the South-East corner of England, so expect posts which seem to have been written in the middle of the night.
• This is my first proper move into the world of tech writing, so I dare say you’ve never heard of me before.
• I first switched in 2007 with the receipt of my 20″ iMac, which I still have today.
• If you visited me, you’d find the iMac, a late-2008 MacBook, two iPhone 3GSs and two iPod touches (2nd generation).

I’m joining TheAppleBlog as the newest How-To and tutorial writer. Look out for my series of ‘Quick Tips’ which will hopefully teach you something useful in a short amount of time. I’m open to feedback, argument, insult etc. in the comments area of my posts, so chatter away.

If you have trouble sleeping at night, try reading my stream of dullness that is @jobbogamer on Twitter.

* Contrary to popular belief, not all teenagers sit on MSN and Facebook all day long.