The First Annual Chris Skoyles Year End Awards: PART 2

Yes, as promised, I'm back with the second part of my Year End Awards. In Part One, we looked at my favourite albums, artists and gigs of 2011, in this installment we'll look at my favourite blogs, websites and other stuff from the past 12 months.

The 'Must have in your RSS Reader' Award for Blog of the year

WINNER:

Chris Guillebeau - The Art of Non-Conformity 
World-traveler, entrepreneur and author of the excellent book The Art of Non-Conformity, a great piece of writing about how to live an awsome life on your own terms, expands upon the ideas in that book with posts about life, work and travel in this blog of the same name.

I read The Art of Non-conformity book in the space of a day when I first picked it up earlier this year, and I don't think I've missed a single post from Chris all year, always finding something to motivate and inspire me whether it's in regards to my writing, long-term goals or generally kicking arse at life. Always a great read and definitely worth checking out.

RUNNERS UP:

• Hypebot.com
• The Problem with Young People Today

The 'Where would I be without you?' Award for Most Useful Tool of the Year

WINNER:

Springpad

After the rumours in late 2010 that Yahoo were killing off the Delicious social booking service, I set about looking for a viable alternative. 

A couple of options were tested, but Springpad was the clear winner; not only did it allow me to easily import all my bookmarks over from Delicious (which, as it turned out, was actually just sold, not shut down), but it also took over from most of the tasks Evernote used to handle for me, and did them much better and with a much slicker interface than Evernote.

Since then I've used Springpad to do everything from managing my Haigh Fest short list to keeping track of which poems I've had published to planning for meetings and more.

Overall it's an awesome tool and I'd be lost without it.

RUNNERS UP:

• Duotrope submissions tracker
• Hootsuite

The 'Time for a break' Film of the Year Award

WINNER:

Resurrect Dead 
It was at least four years ago that I first heard about Toynbee Tiles, mysterious pieces of art planted into the asphalt of US streets with cryptic messages about bringing dead folk back to life on planet Jupiter and making references to the work of historian Arnold Toynbee and filmmaker Stanley Kubrick.

After originally reading about them in an edition of The Metro newspaper, my curiosity and hunger to learn more about the tiles led me to writing an article of my own, featuring interviews with Justin Duerr, Colin Smith and Steve Weinik, three men from Philadelphia who were working on a film about the tiles.

I quickly lost touch with them after the article, but kept up-to-date on the film's progress via the Resurrect Dead website and was delighted earlier this year when I saw that not only had the film been released, but it had done pretty well too.

That background aside, this is a really great documentary, full of mystery and intrigue, beautiful shot and well worth anybody's time.

RUNNERS UP:

• Rise of Planet of the Apes
• 127 Hours

The 'I'm Going to Hit You with a Big Stick' Award for Most Annoying Thing of the Year

WINNER:

Sitekit
I've been working with content management system Sitekit for the best part of the last twelve months at the day job and, funnily enough, whenever I've been faced with a web-based project at that same day job in the last twelve months, I've experienced nothing but frustration.

Chances are that those frustrations are as much to do with the awful computer I'm provided with at work, but even as terrible as that machine is, I doubt it's solely responsible for the amount of times Sitekit slowly grinds to a withering halt before crashing altogether.

Then again, maybe it is.

Looking around the 'net, I've read a lot of good things about Sitekit, so it can't be all that bad, but I could honestly write a 1000 word post about ll the headaches and frustrations I've suffered because of this particular CMS in the past year. I won't, but I could.

RUNNERS UP:

• People who readily share every detail of their lives on Facebook then complain about privacy.
• People who say "that awkward moment when..." and then go on to describe a situation that isn't really awkward at all.
• Running out of categories for 'Year End Awards' blogs