This year, there were a handful of technology/software products that truly changed my life, and I wanted to take a little time to thank their makers publicly.
The first, and most important, is WordPress. Without it, my own blog ComeAcross wouldn't exist, because I wouldn't have had the opportunity to combine the content from my various other sites into a single, easy to use collection. 
The WordPress motto — "a state of the art semantic personal publishing platform" — couldn't be truer, and I'm here to attest to that. It was easy to combine content from my previous Blogger blog and two of my personal sites into what I now call ComeAcross, and it is easy, every day, to publish more content that may benefit others. That's really the purpose of ComeAcross — sharing what I think is useful information with others — and WordPress made it possible.
Another amazing product, which has had the same impact for me, is Zooomr. Where WordPress has helped me publish words, Zooomr has helped me publish photographs — beautiful images that I wanted to share with the world. It's no fun to build image galleries in Photoshop and/or Dreamweaver, and publish them manually, then have to edit them manually and republish every time I make a change. It's also not fun to use an inflexible or cumbersome solution, or a photo sharing site where your photos don't really get seen because they get lost in the crowd. It really helps to have a site where you've got ease of use, tons of features and lots of flexibility built in — not to mention an audience that will help you get better through their interaction with your photos.
Article comments
1 - Eric Berlin
I agree that gmail is really a tremendous product, Raoul. I honestly don't know what I would do without it. After having three jobs and a major career shift over the past few years, gmail is the thing that has allowed me to keep vital information handy and allow me to communicate while switching jobs/offices/computers/laptops, etc. etc.!