Last Minute Gifts for Bloggers

As the shopping days before Christmas quickly run out, here are some last minute gift ideas for the blogger in your life.

The iPhone Glove by Dots- $20

I feel warmer just looking at these gorgeous geek gloves. Knitted from one-hundred percent merino lambswool sourced from the United Kingdom the gloves undergo a rigorous softening process, working every fiber to its utmost comfort. They are then finished with a straight stretch cuff so that the thumb, index, and middle fingertips can operate an iPhone with skin-like responsiveness.

They are available for both men and women and come in four different colors.

Belkin Laptop Hideaway- £23.46

Let’s face it, gadgets aren’t exactly French Country chic. If you’re trying to keep your house looking nice for relatives, this Laptop Hideaway will be your savior. The hideaway bad is made to sit on the floor next to your couch (or bed, chair, or desk), while keeping your laptop protected and hidden away from view. The hideaway has enough room for your power supply, mouse and paperwork. It fits 15.4-inch laptops-both widescreen and standard.

TikTok and LunaTik iPod Nano Watches- $34.95, $69.95

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In November, we featured TikTok’s iPod Nano Watch, which raised close to $1 million on Kickstarter, grabbing the spot for most money raised on the fund crowdsourcing site to date. Based on the idea that the world’s first multi-touch watch should be designed for the Nano, Scott Wilson, the founder of Chicago-based design studio MINIMAL, made two designs, the TikTok and its premier partner the LunaTik, which both transform the iPod Nano into the world’s coolest multi-touch watches. The watches are hardly just Nanos slapped onto cheap plastic. They are well designed; engineered and manufactured from premium materials that complement the quality of Apple products. Buy here.

Kodak Zi8 – $99

Blogging isn’t just about words these days and a video can be a fun way of telling a story in a different way. If the blogger in your life is partial to gadgets, a handheld video camera might be just the ticket.

The Kodak Zi8 is what The Next Web team can often be seen carrying at events and conferences and we highly recommend it. This tiny device is good looking, highly capable and rugged enough to take a few knocks along the way too.

It takes SD cards, has a replaceable battery and charges over USB, meaning that it lasts and lasts. It shoots excellent video for its diminutive size too, recording 720p video that looks great on the web.

Flickr Pro Account – $24.95

Flickr is mainly used for sharing photos, but it’s a really good place for hosting the images you use in blog posts too, especially if you use a lot and don;t want to be stung by bandwidth charges or exceed the storage limit on your blog account.

The free Flickr account is fine to start with, but a Pro account gives unlimited storage, stats about your account and the ability to play back HD videos at full resolution. Flickr also makes Pro accounts really easy to give as gifts, either as a printable card or by email.

Logitech H555 headset – $59.99

If the blogger in your life is the news-gathering or podcasting type, they may well spend a lot of time using Skype or recording audio into their computer. While many computers now have built-in microphones, a decent headset is invaluable for cutting out background noise and capturing voices clearly.

This Logitech H555 does the job well at an appealing price, featuring a noise-cancelling microphone and ‘Super Wideband Audio’ for clearer Internet calls.

Laptop skin – $49.95

Who wants to blog at home all the time? Sometimes it’s good to get out and about. However (and we’re speaking from experience here), dropping your laptop into your bag without protection is asking for trouble. It will be scuffed, cracked or chipped before you know it.

InCase offers a range of practical and stylish skins and cases for 13, 15 and 17-inch notebooks. We’re quite fond of this animal-themed design, but more minimalist looks are available too.

MacBook Air – $999 – $1599

If money’s no object and you’re looking to give the blogger in your life the ultimate gift, we have to recommend the recently released MacBook Air models. Available in both petite 11-inch and more substantial 13-inch models, the MacBook Air is light to carry around (you probably won’t even notice it’s in your bag) and  stunningly thin.

What’s more, despite a relatively slow processor, it’s perfectly  capable of handling all the blogging tasks you can throw at it. Right now, I’ve got 12 tabs open in Chrome, Spotify, iChat, the GIMP image editor, Evernote and three Adobe Air apps running on my 13-incher and it’s not flinching. It really is the perfect blogging machine.

Coconatch $16

Coconatch is a social robot that brings your @replies to life by lighting up and performing a wobbly happy dance when you receive a message from Twitter.

These little robots work via USB and will burst into dance after receiving a new message from its unique email address. This means you’ll need to direct Twitter notifications to Coconatch’s email address, and we’re assuming it also means users aren’t limited to just Twitter notifications–it appears that any new email will cause the robot to get groovy.

If indeed all new emails are supported, users could potentially use Coconatch to work with any social network as long as the network’s updates are being directed to the robot’s email address.

Livescribe $208

If you’re at a conference, event or interview and typing is just inconvenient, the Livescribe is basically a computer in a pen.

Using this clever pen and smart paper, the Livescribe converts handwriting for conversion to text on a PC, but also allows you to hear what was being said at the moment of writing by tapping on the note.