Thing 28 – Customized Home Pages

After reading the reviews, I chose NetVibes to create a home page because it seemed to have the features I wanted. I had tried iGoogle in the first 23 Things program and agree with the reviewer who said it was ugly. Also Google is getting a bad rep privacy-wise.

Netvibes was fairly easy to set up, although I couldn’t figure out why I seemed to have a blank column on the left until I added an RSS feed. I do like having my FaceBook, Twitter, Delicious and Gmail accounts all available from the page, as well as weather, a calendar, a calculator and Google Maps. Convenience counts. I hardly ever used the iGoogle page, but I will use this one.

Our library already has a customized page, housed on our shared network drive, for staff to use at work. It looks like the top page of our Web site except that it includes links to our subscription services that are available only in-house. I think this is preferable to using a third-party site. I wouldn’t want all my personal links on a shared site.

Thing 27 -- Twitter

My first experience of Twitter was at a conference. The presenter was talking about Web 2.0 tools, including Twitter. One of the other speakers was in the audience, sitting toward the front with his laptop open Twittering about the presentation as it was going on. The speaker treated it as part of the discussion, even putting the tweets up on the screen for the audience. On any other subject, I believe the keyboard tapping sounds would have been distracting.

My experience trying to sign up for Twitter did not get off to a good start. It was the middle of the afternoon and the connection sl-oooo-w. At about 3:45 I got the fail whale. (Cool!) It was time to sign out for the day. I did finally succeed (my Twitter user name is BlankAnn.) Trouble is, I have a hard time thinking of anything worthwhile to say.

It seems to me that Twitter in libraries makes the most sense as an adjunct to the library’s blog or website—assuming the reader would want more information. Our library has no blog, but we decided to set up a Twitter feed. Last I checked, we had 22 followers, many of them news organizations.

Thing 26 Ning

I’ve been a member of the Law Librarians Ning since round one but I only joined the 23 Things Ning in round 2. Ning is good for networking with smaller groups that share a more narrow focus than Facebook or Linkedin. I have found some of the discussions interesting and useful. The Ning environment would probably be great for planning a class reunion.

Thing 26

Thing 26

Thing 25 -- Bloggers Toolkit

Wow, so many apps; so little time.

As a social sciences type, I had to try the Typealizer first. My blog came out as ESTP - a Doer. Don’t remember what my own profile was the last time I took that test, but it started with an I. It isn’t clear how the site arrives at its conclusions, but all the 23 Things blogs probably use a lot of active words because we are writing about things we are doing. The 23 Things project itself is “active and playful” and the people who would take it on must in some way be “happiest with action-filled work which craves their full attention and focus.” So maybe they are onto something here.

As a public law library, we would be interested in tools that would make our site more accessible. A gadget for converting blog text into speech would be useful to people with reading disabilities or just eyestrain from staring at a computer all day. I would envision our library’s blog and podcasts to have different purposes, with the blog having short entries and the podcasts being more in depth, so I doubt a gadget to convert the blog to podcasts would be that helpful. I added vozme to my blog. It was easy to use and the machine-generated voice was understandable and not at all unpleasant.

Again, as a social sciences type, I love statistics. I didn’t end up adding any of the widgets, however. Google Analytics looks like overkill, SiteMeter requires signing up with a third-party, and the others offered only maps. This little blog just won’t generate enough data to make any of these interesting. If we start a library blog, we can use the statistics program that comes with our Web site. So, on to surveys—another toy of the social sciences. Again, this will be more useful on a blog that a lot of people would read (unlike the one you are reading now.) For now, I used the Blogger poll gadget. OK everybody, you have until February 20 to answer the poll. Hello?

After looking at the Archive Calendar, I notice a reason to prefer Blogger gadgets—no compatibility problems.

To be honest, I am not that interested in blogs. While all these widgets may be interesting, they are not relevant to my job or my library’s Web site. After spending about four hours over two day, I have run out of interest and patience with this Thing. If and when we start a serious blog for the library, I will be back. For now, let’s move on.

Thing 24 – updating my blog part 2

Looking at gadgets, I decided to add the subscription links, just in case anyone wants to follow me on this journey. I didn’t add the one for followers, though. If there aren’t any, I don’t want to know or to advertise the fact. (smile) As part of looking at gadgets, I actually removed a couple. One was the blog list. I replaced it with the newer blog list gadget which let me add blogs directly from my Google Reader account. (I didn’t add all of them; just ones I think people on this list may be interested in.) This gadget makes a nicer looking list than the old one. (It also added the Google Reader logo. Nice try, Google; I removed it.)

I had been through the list of gadgets in the last Thing. There weren’t any of the old ones that I changed my mind about. I don’t want to clutter up the page. Adding pictures is still a possibility, but Facebook may have replaced the blog as a place to share pictures with friends and family. We haven’t started a blog at the library yet, but when we do, I think it will be relatively free of gadgets, too. As a law library, we don’t have the same whiz bang persona as a public library. It was nice to see all the other third-party templates available for Blogger because we may have to use Blogger for the library’s blog and we wouldn’t want it to look amateurish.

In addition to updating my Yahoo avatar, I played with the South Park avatar site. It made a cute avatar but it didn’t save and I ran out of time. Maybe I’ll try again.

I tend to view blogging as a cross between journaling (boring) and journalism (practical). There are a couple dozen things in my Google Reader, but I tend to read them as I would a newspaper. Outside of this blog, I don’t “journal” myself.