During the Trav­el­ing Geeks’ trip to the United King­dom last month, I spent some time polling the Geeks about the pro­duc­tiv­ity and must-have tools that they use dur­ing the course of a typ­i­cal workday.

I did the same thing dur­ing the first Geeks trip to Israel last year and came away with a wealth of apps, some of which I incor­po­rated into my daily rou­tine: See Tools the alpha geeks use. Back then, the list included Qik, TweetScan, Friend­Feed, Skype, Blog­lines, Pan­dora, Foxy­tunes, NetVibes, Socialth­ing, Seesmic, Adium — and it serves as an inter­est­ing snap­shot in time of what tools some of the top Bay Area blog­gers and tech­nol­o­gists were using in spring 2008.

This time around there was more empha­sis on social media ser­vices like Twit­ter as well as mul­ti­me­dia apps. Among the tools in the Geeks’ arse­nal: Zemanta, Tweet­deck, Hoot­Suite, Peo­ple­Browsr, Mind­jet, Shop­style and Friend­feed (Twit­ter and Face­book are givens). Remem­ber, this is a par­tial, on-the-fly list of use­ful tools — intended to intro­duce read­ers to some apps they might not be using — and not a com­pre­hen­sive list, and it also doesn’t take into con­sid­er­a­tion any of the startup apps’ we were intro­duced to in the UK.

Also, whether you’re a geek or not, please add your favorite tools in the com­ments so we can all learn what works for you!

Here’s our rundown:

JD Lasica

• Fire­fox, with occa­sional for­ays into Flock and Safari; Fire­bug and Zemanta plug-ins

• Word­Press, the open-source plat­form for my Socialmedia.biz and Socialbrite.org blogs

• I just started using Hoot­Suite 2.0, a Web-based, Ajax-smart Twit­ter appli­ca­tion that I find supe­rior (so far) to the down­load­able Tweet­deck and Seesmic Desk­top apps. (I’m @jdlasica on Twitter.)

• Zoho Writer and Zoho Sheets, which are supe­rior to Google Docs (though I use the lat­ter when forced)

• Fetch tied to BBE­dit, to man­age files on my blogs’ servers

• Snapz Pro X, to cap­ture images and movies from any Mac com­puter screen

• Flickr Uploadr, to batch-upload pho­tos to my Flickr photostream

• Paparazzi, a won­der­ful tool for Mac users to cap­ture entire Web pages — even the por­tions that appear below the fold

• Final Cut Express for almost all my video editing

• Gmail for email and to store files in the cloud

• Google Talk and Skype for most of my chats

• Deli­cious for social book­mark­ing in the cloud

• Google Reader to keep track of blogs and share sto­ries to Socialbrite

• Vimeo and Blip.tv for video sharing

• VLC, the open source media player, to watch videos in almost any format

• Still alter­nat­ing between iTunes and Pan­dora for my music jones

• Still try­ing to learn Quick­Sil­ver (so far unsuc­cess­fully) for key­board short­cuts. Con­sid­er­ing Launch­Bar.

• Google cal­en­dar to man­age my events, though I need to get back to using Upcom­ing more.

• Face­book for wast­ing time

• iPhone apps: Google maps (for loca­tion), Stanza and eReader (for read­ing), exper­i­ment­ing with Twit­ter­fon, Tweet­deck, Twit­te­la­tor and Sim­ply Tweet for Twit­ter, Ever­note (for keep­ing notes online), Loopt and Google Lat­i­tude for geo-awareness, Yelp for restau­rants, Rocket Taxi, iTalk and Quick­Voice (for inter­views and record­ing ran­dom thoughts)

Robert Scoble

Robert — the former famed Microsoft blogger — has gone to an all-Mac household ("I like the OS better," he says), though he runs Windows 7 using Parallels Desktop on his MacBook Pro laptop.

Robert generally chooses his apps to run in the cloud rather than buying OEM packaged software. "I'm trying to move my life completely to the browser. Ido everything on the Internet. The only thing I do locally is video editing," for which he uses iMovie for his personal videos.

Some of his choice apps:

• Friendfeed (“Friendfeed is my chat application.”)

• PeopleBrowsr, for social media search

• Mindjet, for mindmapping presentations

• Tweetdeck, to manage Twitter

• Seesmic, to post video and manage Twitter

• Google Docs and Spreadsheets for free office applications

• iPhone 3GS, SimplyTweet and whole bunch of other apps

• iMovie

Howard Rheingold

• Firefox

• CopyPaste Pro: "If I had to recommend only one tool for Mac users, this would be it. It remembers the last 200 objects of any media type that I cut or copied to the clipboard."

• Skype for voice over IP

• Google Talk for chat

• Social Media Classroom (of course)

• Diigo, a research and knowledge-sharing tool

• Final Cut Express

• GraphicConverter

• Seesmic Desktop

• Powerpoint

• Wordpress

• iPhone GS for video and Mobypicture and Pixelpipe apps

"Sky" Schuyler

Sky Schuyler, CTO of the Dalai Lama Foundation, served as the tech lead on our trip and time and again generously shared information about his tech habits. Some of his favorite tools:

• WordPress to power a long list of blogs

• Sky uses a Flip Mino recorder and occasionally its internal software to do rudimentary video editing.

• FeedWordPress: Sky configured this plug-in to suck our individual blog feeds into the TravelingGeeks.com WordPress blog.

• YARPP (Yet Another Related Posts Plug-in), a Firefox plug-in for Firefox that finds related posts within my blog and I have configured it with a special CSS so it also displays little thumbnails next to the suggested posts.

• PGP to encrypt email and confidential data on his computer.

• Google Docs, chiefly for sharing word docs in the cloud.

• Zemanta, the Firefox plug-in. “I can’t believe how much better my posts are, how much more relevant and complete they are.”

• BBEdit for plain text processing ("I use this more than any other app except browsers"), Apple Pages for rich and beautiful documents, and Microsoft Office and Open Office otherwise.

• OmniGraffle: Like Visio, it lets you create diagrams to group concepts together graphically.

• Sky runs Ubuntu, a Linux distribution, on a virtual machine. VMWare Fusion is the VM he uses to run Windows XP and Ubuntu 8.04; he “tests” incoming viruses by running WMWare “sandbox,” which he then throws away after infected.

• QuickTime Pro and Final Cut Express for editing video, as well as Flip4mac to output videos in .wmv and .flv formats.

• Tweetdeck, which he prefers over Seesmic Desktop.

• Ecto to blog when offline and to cross-post more easily

• Retrospect to back up photos and Apple's Time Machine to back up every­thing — but he copies all his pho­tos to phys­i­cal stor­age data DVDs.

Meghan Asha

• Shop­style, a shop­ping appli­ca­tion that pro­vides a visual search for online goods.

• Tum­blr, a blog plat­form and app that lets you pub­lish videos and pic­tures from your cell­phone, espe­cially use­ful for life­cast­ing or moblog­ging. “Tum­blr is amaz­ing — if your grand­mother didn’t know how to blog, go on there, it’s life-changing,” Meghan gushes.

• iPhone apps: Mint, Yelp, Stanza (free app that lets you down­load and read from a selec­tion of more than 100,000 books and peri­od­i­cals), Pano ($2.99 app that lets you take seam­less panoramic pho­tos on your iPhone), and Talk­Bub­bles ($4.99 app that lets you add dia­logue in comic strip-like bub­bles to your photos)

• Skitch lets you anno­tate web­sites with com­ments, draw­ings, arrows, etc., then upload the sketch to their web­site and share it or blog it. “It’s just plain fun,” she says.

• Zemanta, a Fire­fox browser add-on that lets you eas­ily add images to your blog posts. I started using Zemanta on my Word­Press blogs after meet­ing the company’s CTO and hear­ing Susan and Meghan rave about it.

• Tweet­deck, a free down­load­able app for both your com­puter and iPhone that lets you man­age your Twit­ter stream.

• iMovie, part of Apple’s iLife suite, to eas­ily edit her videos. “No boy interns,” she sighed with a wan smile.

Susan Brat­ton

• MobyP­ic­ture for syn­di­cat­ing my pho­tos and videos from my iPhone and Mac across all my social nets simul­ta­ne­ously (kicks Twit­Pic’s booty). Susan wrote about it on her DishyMix blog.

• Tweet­Later Pro­fes­sional for sched­ul­ing tweets in advance (Susan wrote about it in her roundup of social media tools)

• Trackur for online rep­u­ta­tion man­age­ment and social lis­ten­ing. It’s supe­rior to Google Alerts. (See her post on Online Rep­u­ta­tion Guide­lines.

• Test­ing uberVU, a social media com­ment­ing track­ing and reply sys­tem, in their pri­vate beta. (See her post on this.)

• A Twit­ter Cus­tom Search book­mark on her Fire­fox browser tool­bar (see her post on how to do this).

• Skype with screen shar­ing (see Are You There? Skype is My Trav­el­ing Geeks Life­line).

• Inno­vate Ads “video spokesper­son” and video ban­ners for my book, Talk Show Tips. See Cre­at­ing a High Con­vert­ing Video Spokesper­son for Your Land­ing Page).

• iMovie with YouTube uploader

• Word­press with Zemanta plug-in (image and arti­cle rec­om­men­da­tions) for Firefox

• Face­book

• Flickr via iPhoto uploader

• Tweet­deck on her Mac Mini

• iPhone app: Twit­terific

Craig New­mark

• Pine, an old-timey email application

• Fire­fox

• Google cal­en­dar

• Google docs

• Google maps

• Seesmic Desk­top

• Picasa

• iPhone apps, includ­ing Rimshot and Trom­bone (sound effects)

Renee Blod­gett

• EasyTweets: man­age mul­ti­ple Twit­ter accounts, SMS and email key­word alerts, sched­ule, import feeds, and more
• Group­Mail, a way to send per­son­al­ized email mar­ket­ing cam­paigns from your Win­dows desk­top
• Out­look, the peren­nial email client, and a cus­tomized Out­look mar­ket­ing tool (a pro­pri­etary tool that con­verts Out­look stuff to for­mat­table stuff for export and dis­tri­b­u­tion to cus­tomized groups)
• Fire­fox
• Google Maps
• Face­book
• YouTube
• Flip cam­era
• Word­press
• Type­pad
• File­maker
• Twit­ter
• Ad-Aware for spy­ware
• Acro­nis for data backup
• iTunes
• Skype for inter­na­tional con­ver­sa­tions and chat
• NetVibes
• MobyP­ic­ture
• Sharp­cast for sync­ing your data across the Web
• Voyij.com for travel searches
• Blurb
• Smug­mug
• Flickr

Tom Forem­ski

• Ecto to post when offline but he is switch­ing to MyBlogEdit and Mov­able­Type for their addi­tional functionalities.

• He uses the su.pr url short­ener from Stum­ble­upon for tweet­ing posts — now or later.

• Fire­fox

• iMovie 8, “a great tool for quick video edit­ing and upload”

Ayelet Noff

Some of the tools Ayelet used most dur­ing the Geeks’ trip:

• Flickr
• Friend­Feed
• iMovie
• Twit­ter
• Tweet­deck
• Google Maps
• Google cal­en­dar
• Face­book
• iPhoto
• iPhone

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.

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