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...

Podcasting & YouTube

Podcasts seem good! I've subscribed to BBC Radio 4's History of the World in 100 Objects. I've heard one or two on the radio, and been very impressed by them. They take an object (often in the British Museum?), and examine what the object tells us about some aspect of world history. And they get top-class academics on to do the discussion.

As an example, here's Oxford's Barry Cunliffe using some bronze flagons to discuss the Celts and drinking: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/ahow/ahow_20100224-1000a.mp3

Now the show is in my Google Reader I can listen to all of the episodes and not miss any- hurrah! I can definitely see the use of this, I love Radio 4 but only normally listen to it in my car. Will be adding more programs, I think.

I've been using YouTube for aaaaages. Didn't know the stuff about channels before though, so that's a neat discovery. Also didn't know there was so much education-related stuff. So yes, very interesting task.

Have a video of the "March of the Librarians":

Google Reader

Google Reader is excellent!

It's certainly solving a lot of the issues I had with blogs in last week's post- finally I can see when blogs are updated and just read those bits, not all the posts on a blog.

I've subscribed to a big pile of other 23 Things blogs, so I look forward to reading other people's opinions nice and easily. It was very cool the way Google saw all my Blogspot subscriptions and copied them straight into the Reader, made this week's task much easier!

I still prefer Livejournal as my blogging & rss platform, as I think the Livejournal communities are such a good feature, but I can definitely see advantages to the Google & Blogspot combination.

Blogs

Now I have to write my thoughts about blogs, apparently.

I got my first blog (on Livejournal) whilst at university. My second is the official OIL one, mainly used to update our news on Facebook via RSS. And then there's this one.

My overwhelming thought about blogs is: they're not really that great. There are a lot of problems with them, really. I especially dislike the way things are ordered chronologically starting with the most recent- it's like reading a book starting with reading the last chapter, then the penultimate, and so on. Or like watching Memento.
Of course, you can always start at the bottom, but that's a bit like reading a book by always starting at the beginning. It's fine, as long as you're reading the book in one sitting. But what about if you've already read half the book? Blogs just don't have a convenient way of putting a bookmark in. And for something that has new content added all the time, that's a huge problem.
So yes, in many ways I prefer forums or emails- the way they combine chronological ordering whilst automatically and easily showing you which are "unread posts" appeals to me.

On the other hand, blogs do have uses. On Livejournal I *love* the Friends Page. On one page I can have all the blog posts from all my friends, plus any RSS feeds I want (Unshelved comics alongside the latest news), plus any posts made to Livejournal Communities I'm a member of. Ideal. An excellent one-stop place to keep informed of the wider world- it's like a better version of Blogger's Reading List of Blogs I'm Following. Although, of course, it does still suffer the sorting-posts-chronologically problem.

I also really like blogs for short informative things, like the OIL blog. It tells readers what the current big projects are, changes to our opening hours, that sort of thing. It's useful! And most posts are self-contained, which means the chronological problem isn't an issue.

Finally, I love the newer developments in blogs- things like trackbacks, where you can see places that have linked to a post. That's neat. Or the RSS feeds can then be fed into Facebook or Livejournal or wherever. And tagging interests me, as a cataloguer.

So yes. I'm torn on the issue of blogs. I think they're overused and there are times that other tools (like forums) would be better. And the ordering of posts annoys me deeply. And yet I still keep several blogs, and watch a whole bunch by checking my Livejournal Friends regularly.

Blogs get a resounding "Meh" from me. I'm too torn to go one way or the other.