So... I had used google maps, google books, google translate, google analytics, blogger, google groups, and even created a gmail account for blog, but I had never heard of igoogle before. It look reasonably nice and is easy to use; there are countless different themes to customize it. With boring predictability I searched for "book", and found one with engravings of palm trees apparently from a Dutch rare book. Serendipity.
The "stuff" one can add to the page ranges from the serious and / or practical, to the completely useless and weird. A bit like on Facebook, except that here, you don't have daily requests from friends to add an application that tells you what type of cocktail you had been in a previous life. Boringly again, I stuck to the stuff I knew already and am sure to use. The cute animals which do things in a corner of your screen are probably funny for a while, but, well, for a while only.
Although igoogle seems like a convenient way to have all one's tools and favourite pages in one place, I am not sure I want to adopt it for my personal use. For the thing to be handy, one needs to be constantly logged in with your google account, which I am find myself slightly reluctant to do.
More interesting is the possibility to aggregate all the RSS feeds thay one is following, and to classify them through tabs. However the professional interest is limited ; there doesn't seem to be a way to create a public file with interesting rss feed and share it - but maybe I haven't had a close enough look.
A friend of mine who is training to be a librarian in France suggested I had a look at Netvibes instead, which allows for both private and public pages. It has been used for example by the University Library of Lyon 1 to aggregate news, rss feeds of new publications, etc.. classified by subjects, and subdivided by categories of users. It sounds like a great idea, provided of course that the page is sufficiently advertised and is actually being used by students.
Nice to see that NetVibes example. I checked it out too and could see plenty of room for applying it. Loved your Facebook cocktails comment.
ReplyDeleteI have been playing around with netvibes to add all the rss feeds for the cam23blogs.
ReplyDeleteCheck out the public page at
http://www.netvibes.com/cam23blogfeeds#cam23blogs
I also created a private page to play around with as a subject resource to use in the library but needed more time to create better search criteria as not getting accurate results.