Happy First Anniversary, Web Worker Daily!

On Labor Day 2006, Om Malik and the GigaOM team started this blog/community as a resource for (and a salute to) those of us who were living a sockless lifestyle:

What are the best tools and what is the right gear to stay in touch with your team? How do you motivate your distributed teams when you are all dispersed all over the planet? The answers for these questions are hard to come by, and it was precisely for these reasons, we are introducing a new group weblog/community, Web Worker Daily.

We learned from each other. We learned to think beyond the initial vision of “going bedouin.” Sure, Web Workers are in cafes and spare bedrooms, but we’re also in small businesses, nonprofit organizations and cubicle farms. We’re using Linux, Mac OS X and all flavors of Windows. Our income comes from every combination of salary, freelance income, direct sales and advertising. The Web isn’t merely a tool, it’s what allows us to make our living in ways that were impossible in the ’90s. In short, the Web Worker is anywhere folks want to use the new web to expand our professional reach and work smarter. Let’s keep figuring it out together.

In our inaugural year, we published 743 posts and over 10,000 comments. We have over 16,000 feed subscribers, we are consistently ranked as a top blog on Technorati and climbing! Thank you! Keep letting us know what you want to see (and don’t want to see) on this site.

In honor of all the lists that we do, here’s another look at the 10 most popular posts from the past year:

1. 10 New Ways to Make Money Online
2. Rock Your Google Calendar in 18 Ways
3. 20 Different Ways to Manage Your To Dos
4. 6 Firefox Extensions for Web Workers
5. Gmail: Not Behind, Just Going in a Different Direction
6. Sync Google Calendar With Your Phone
7. 12 Ways to Use Facebook Professionally
8. Eight Google Apps in Your Future
9. 20 Ways to Use LinkedIn Productively
10. Jot This Down! An Overview of Popular Note-Taking Applications

What’s next? More posts, of course. More coverage of new web-enabled tools, both in and out of the browser. More tips & tricks for productivity. More analysis of what this all means, and ideas on how we can continue to earn a living while trying to define what we do. You can also look forward to a refresh of this site’s design and a companion book, written by Editor-at-Large Anne Zelenka (with an assist by yours truly). We’ll have details on both the redesign and the book very soon.

Special thanks to everyone who contributed to this site in the past year: Sabra Aaron, Leo Babauta, Stephen Collins, Samuel Dean, Katie Fehrenbacher, Liz Gannes, Chris Gilmer, Mike Gunderloy, Niall Kennedy, Narendra, Matthew Reinbold, Dian Schaffhauser, Judi Sohn, Dameon Welch-Abernathy, Jackson West, Anne Zelenka, and of course our fearless leader, Om Malik.

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