Go Go Gadget Gadgets!

So, last week I was on holiday and missed playing around with gadgets and widgets. I'm catching up with them now!

They're useful. There are so many Web 2.0 tools, it's nice to have something that makes it possible to pull them all together- to put my flickr on my blog, or my bookmarks on my iGoogle, or my RSS reader on my iGoogle or whatever. The whole interplay of the different platforms is something I really like about Web 2.0. So yes, this was a good week.

First I put my Flickr photostream at the bottom of my blog, then changed my mind and put it on the sidebar. It's not a very interesting display at the moment (pictures of a card catalogue we were offering), but it should be better when I upload my Easter holiday snaps! I also changed the colour scheme for the blog, as I decided the black background was a bit irritating.

I didn't fancy having Google headlines on my blog, so didn't bother with that additional thing. Oh, how rebellious!

I don't like the delicious gadgets, and I don't really like delicious. So I fiddled with them a bit before abandoning them in favour of my trusty Google Bookmark widget. I took this chance to put in two new Google Bookmark widgets- this way all my links tagged "Cataloguing" will be in one widget, all my "House hunting" ones in another and all my "Re-enactment" ones in a third. Excellent!

But although the Delicious Widget is a Nay, Gadgets and Widgets in general are a big Yay!

We're half way there...

So, thought I'd do a bit of a review. Which of the 23 Things have been useful and which do I think I will I keep up?

I was initially anti-iGoogle, not seeing the need for it and disliking it's clutter. But, having set it up so it just showed me things I'm really interested in, it's now proving invaluable and is my homepage both at work and at home. I've also embraced (because they work so well inside iGoogle) Google Reader for getting RSS feeds of blogs & podcasts and Google Bookmarks so I can access all my bookmarks wherever I go. If only there was a good Livejournal gadget!
I'm also a big fan of Flickr- being able to upload higher resolution versions of pictures is excellent, I've always hated Facebook for it's compression.

Picnik was fun, but I'd rather use Picture Publisher. Guess I may use it if I'm at a PC that doesn't have an image manipulation program? I didn't like Delicious for personal use- my bookmarks are for my personal reference, not for everyone else, and Google Bookmarks sits better in Google Reader. But still, I can see Delicious could be good for libraries to advertise online resources and so on.

So yes. Despite my initial cynicism and belief I'd already seen every Web 2.0 tool that mattered I've now become addicted to a whole bunch more. I'm not sure this is neccessarily a good thing, but oh well! There's another 6 weeks to go, and I dread to think what I'm going to get hooked on next...

Om-nom-nom-nom... Mmm, Delicious

I often move around computers. There are several I use at work, I've got one in my flat, I use my girlfriend's computer and sometimes my mum's computer. So loosing track of where I saved which bookmarks is a constant problem. But no longer! Apparently.

On the surface, Delicious seems great. But there's two big problems with it:

• It's just not as easy as my favourites on IE or whatever. Those are available from a sidebox, a toolbar *and* a menu. Whilst I need to go to a whole new website to see Delicious. And to get to that website, I need to use my favourites anyway! If there was a good iGoogle gadget I could forgive it, but there isn't.
  
• Also, it won't let me organise all my links into folders. I like hierarchical structures as well as unstructured systems. So yes, I just like having folders as well as tags, sorry.
  

Delicious definitely isn't useless. The idea of having a tool that lets you share your bookmarks is cool, and the Networks feature that lets you see other people's bookmarks is a good one. But it's not going to change my life and I won't be using it regularly.

So Delicious gets a meh from me, I'm afraid.

I may well be converted by Google Bookmarks, on the other hand. Having all my bookmarks nice and simply in my iGoogle page is great. I know it's Bookmarking not Social Bookmarking, but I've always seen Bookmarking as quite personal anyway. So Google Bookmarks it is!

On the other hand, I think Tags are awesome, I love opening up classification and making it so gloriously post-co-ordinate and unstructured. I've always been a big fan of tags, and I use them excessively in my Googlemail. As I said above, they don't work for everything and I do like having structured nested folders as well, but they are great.

Tags get a big yay!

Over the past week I've also revisited iGoogle, and I must say I'm converted. It means my Googlemail and my Google Reader are in the same window. That's brilliant. It's rapidly becoming essential for me. Especially as I've trimmed it down to just a few gadgets, thus avoiding information overload- BBC Oxford weather, Googlemail, Google Reader and a satirical news site. Yeah, I'm totally revising my opinion of it to a yay.
I just wish more sites had good iGoogle gadgets. Livejournal, for example. There is a gadget that uses the mobile phone Livejournal platform (cunning!), but you have to log into it each time rather than it remembering your details- very irritating.