A date with google calendar

Yet another Google application. Not a bad one admittedly ; I fail to find any major drawback to the thing.

The best feature of Google Calendar, in my opinion, is the possibility to create several calendars (for work meetings, personal invitations, cultural events, etc…) to which you can attribute different colours, and which can all be viewed simultaneously on one page. Calendars can either be private or public, with the possibility to add some events private within a public calendar. Events can be automatically reproduced daily, every week, etc, which is quite practical.

The system of notification of events by email or pop up window is also certainly useful, especially for scatterheads like me, but of course you might not want your email address to be flooded with reminders. I preferred to change the default settings and turn it off.

Another interesting feature of Google Calendar is that it can be used to advertise and invite people to events, but to that purpose doodle has the definite advantage, to my mind.

Then there are some more anecdotic features: you can add the weather forecast, and the calendar is linked to Google maps, so that you get a little map when you enter a location for your events (although admittedly it didn’t manage to find “The Coffee Table” I entered for my 23 thing meeting!). Adding the calendar to igoogle was a piece of cake (figuratively speaking, unfortunately).

Now after saying all those good things about Google calendar, it remains that I still prefer the plain, old-fashioned paper calendar that I carry in my bag all the time and which has the major advantage of being doodlable (I mean old fashioned doodles with a pen). I suspect too I am not the only one. As Libgeek suggested, this would seriously compromise its viability as a staff calendar.

Now the other obvious use for libraries is, as suggested on the 23 Things blog, to use it to advertise events or show opening hours and planned closures. This is an excellent tool for big academic libraries and for public libraries where there are always many events taking place very regularly, but probably not as relevant to college libraries.

Doodle-didoo

Against all appearances to the contrary I am not dead, or on holidays with no internet, and no, I haven’t given up on the 23 Things. I have only been extremely busy the last three weeks, but now I well intend to catch up with all that I missed!

Now for the doodle meeting. I had had opportunities to answer doodle polls before, so was not new to the concept, but I had never organized an event myself. Now this is definitely something I might adopt on a regular basis. Organizing a meeting via doodle is extremely simple and quick, and is a definite better than sending emails back and forth between various participants. The big plus side is that one doesn’t need to register. To modify the poll is also very easy.

When all the questions of space, time, matter and the nature of being have been resolved thanks to a little poll, only one question remains: Will there be biscuits at the meeting? To make sure that the coffee discussion over the 23 things would prove attractive I even set up another doodle poll:

The only thing which I would like to have is the opportunity to give more subtle answers that OK/NO. Something along the lines of YES, PERFECT / NO WAY I CAN DO IT, NO, EVEN IF THERE ARE COOKIES / WELL, YES I CAN, BUT THE COOKIES HAVE BETTER TO BE GOOD BECAUSE IT’S REALLY, REALLY NOT CONVENIENT AT ALL. Or something along these lines. Apparently Doodle allows you to do that already, according to the blog Musings about Librarianship, but I could not find the option. I would be very grateful to whoever would tell me!