Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Thing #29, part 2 -- Google Tools: Search

I wasn't familiar with any of the tools listed in the Search Tools category, so I looked at most of them. The ramifications concerning privacy, or lack thereof, in using Web History made me a little uncomfortable. I wasn't sure the benefits of saving my search history were worth it, so I didn't explore this one very far.

I went further with SearchWiki, watching the video and reading the articles. Opinion is mixed regarding its usefulness. Many people who commented on the articles also questioned Google's motives for having SearchWiki--whether they were looking to provide a beneficial tool to users, or interested in enhancing their search algorithm based on users' comments. I suspect it was probably a little of both. For my part, I don't see a need for custom search results. If I find search results I wanted to keep track of, I would add the sites to del.icio.us or another bookmarking tool, rather than have to repeat a search just to get to them. The ability to view others' comments on a site doesn't appeal to me either. I don't tend to use other review/opinion kinds of web sites, so why would I use this feature in Google?

The search tool I did implement is Alerts. I set a few up for parts of the library's web site that I maintain, to get an idea of who is linking to or commenting on them. I am intrigued about the idea of using alerts to detect copyright violations. I work with a collection of images owned by the library, and in constructing the search to use for one alert I discovered several blogs using images from the collection. Note to self: decide if it is worth tracking down blog owners...

Just for fun, I created one for my name, and was surprised to receive an alert informing me about my previous blog post!

Thing #29, part 1 -- Google Tools: Productivity

I should have gotten to this Thing earlier...it solved an annoyance I've been dealing with for several years.

The Background
For what seems like a long time now, I've been using 2 separate calendar applications. My husband and I share several calendars on Apple's iCal to keep track of various schedules, and I use Mozilla Sunbird at work so I can print my weekly agenda and post it outside my office (my library doesn't use our campus' calendar program to share staff schedules). While the 2 applications use the same calendar format, they couldn't share calendars. That meant I either had to remember to enter everything twice, once in each place, or continuously export and import from one app to the other.

The Solution
I had looked at Google Calendar a little over a year ago to see if it was a better alternative than Sunbird, but it wasn't then. This Thing made me take a second look. Upon reading this sentence: "You can sync you calendar with Outlook, Blackberry devices, and Apple's iCal" [emphasis mine] I became excited. Finally, no more double entry calendaring! A quick install of Google's calaboration code on my MacBook, and I was all set. Now, anything I add to my Google Calendar while I'm at work will show up in iCal at home and my husband's work, and anything either of us add to iCal will show up for me at work.

Productivity tool indeed! This Thing is the winner so far for most immediate application of something I've learned.

Monday, March 23, 2009

Thing #28 -- Custom Home Pages

I created an iGoogle home page as part of Thing 13 and decided to stick with it for this Thing. Since I had explored Pageflakes and MyYahoo previously I didn't look at them again, but I did play around with Netvibes. Netvibes is a lot more appealing visually than iGoogle, but I just couldn't see creating yet another account to keep track of, or taking the time to basically duplicate everything I had in iGoogle. Also, I use both Google Groups and shared Google Documents. If the idea is to increase productivity by having all resources in one place, then iGoogle is the obvious choice for me.

Working on this Thing caused me to reexamine what gadgets I had on iGoogle and whether there were any I should add. I did put 3 new gadgets on my page. Two of them I should have added months ago: Google Reader and Facebook. Now that I am using Twitter, I also added a gadget for it.

Friday, March 13, 2009

Thing #27 -- Twitter

I'd heard of Twitter before, but didn't know much about it before this Thing. I did join, and choose a few people (or organizations) to follow. These are primarily for news (NPR, Star Tribune) or fun (James Lileks, The Onion) or MPR's Bob Collins who is both. I also added mnmorethings. If Twitter is at all useful to me, and I'm not convinced that it is, it will be for doing this kind of following. Very few of my friends or colleagues are on Twitter, so it doesn't work as a method to communicate with them. Since most of them are on Facebook that will probably remain the main way I connect with them online.

Since the ACRL conference is going on now, I wondered if following ACRL or tweets that have the #acrl2009 hashtag would be worthwhile. There are many people using Twitter to live blog ACRL sessions, and I could kind of follow what was going on, especially if I concentrated on just one or two people. I'll have to stick with it a bit longer to see if I learn anything useful, however.

As far as library uses for Twitter go, I don't see an application for them at my library yet. We've been talking about a library blog, or other more social ways to share library news, but haven't done anything except a Facebook page. Once we get our blog going perhaps we'll look into using Twitter to help spread our news.

I thought this would be a good post to share a video I came across several weeks ago. It's John Cleese's Twitter--The Movie from his blog, Cleeseblog.com.