Top 10 time saving technologies

2. RSS readers
Iain Thomson: As web sites have proliferated it's becoming increasingly time consuming to check each one on a regular basis, particularly as content may not have been updated.

As journalists this is particularly apt, which is why RSS readers are so helpful. Having software that checks for you and tells you when something new is happening makes life a whole lot simpler and probably saves us about an hour a day each. It also allows us to trace the flow of information as it spreads out and pinpoint the source much more quickly.

With more and more web sites coming online every day (one estimate is that 20,000 new sites go live every week) it's getting harder and harder to keep up with what is going on. You find new favourite web sites and add them to your list but that list gets longer and before you know it you're forgetting to visit them to check for new stuff. An RSS reader is a very useful tool and may soon be essential.

We decided not to push any one RSS reader because there are so many out there, but Shaun and I both use SharpReader and it does the job well.

Shaun Nichols: We were originally going to make RSS readers our top time saver, but decided that, as journalists, we were a bit biased and the larger public did not rely on them as heavily as we do.

Checking dozens of different sites every day can take up a huge chunk of time. RSS readers exponentially reduce that by taking stories from many sites and organising them into a single list.

If you're a news hound, however, RSS readers are a godsend. You used to be able to spot reporters and editors on the street because they were the ones carrying four or five different newspapers under their arm. These days people still carry the news under their arm, but it's in the form of a laptop, and they're carrying hundreds of papers from all over the world.

It's not just news junkies who have fallen in love with RSS. With everyone and their mother going online and posting blogs, the RSS reader serves as a great way to keep track of what everyone is up to. Perhaps the most successful RSS platform on the web is Twitter, which combines the news feed idea with blogging and social networking, all stuffed into a single web page.

1. Bookmarks
Shaun Nichols: Use the web for more than a few months and you should find yourself managing more than a few bookmarks. Use the same workstation for more than a few years and your bookmark collection will likely be pushing triple digits. Sure, it may be a chore to manage, but imagine having to remember all the sites in your bookmark collection.

As the internet progresses and companies get even more creative with addresses and top-level domains, bookmarks could become even more important. While we're relying more on the internet, it is becoming more complex, and the trusty old bookmark system has remained a staple of life on the web.

Iain Thomson: If I spent half as long organising my living space as I do ordering my bookmarks the girlfriend wouldn't get that pained look in her eye so often when she stays over.

Some might say it's anal but when I click on my bookmark button I want the pages listed right. Top of the list are the most useful, then the long, long list of sites visited every day. But as almost every surfing session ends up with a new bookmark or two and they need to be put into folders for later use, I feel it's a useful exercise. Then those folders have to be ordered so that the most used sites are at the top of the list. I think I may have a problem ...

But personal failings aside, bookmarks are the best time savers out there. Back in the bad old days of the internet, when I got online properly 15 years ago rather than dealing with the abomination that was the JANET network, visiting sites was an exercise in frustration, as you sought to remember incomprehensible web addresses. Hotlisting (the early name for bookmarks) changed all that and it's saved me possibly months of time ever since.