Well I managed to survive Glastonbury and now must catch up with 23Things. The total lack of external news on site meant that I thought the Conservative MP death was just a campsite rumour, so I’m pretty out of the loop.
Setting up iGoogle was simple enough, though I do turn that service off on my personal machines. I don’t like to be signed in everywhere especially as targeted advertising algorithms are becoming more sophisticated all the time and privacy barriers are becoming less and less reliable. That’s one reason I have various online identities and e-mail addresses for some parts of my nefarious private life.
Ditto Google Reader though I find that to be a very cluttered page at least at the moment. I can see how it ‘collects’ together various threads but this could also be done via bookmarks or favourites to a degree. Maybe I don’t get enough information straight off the web yet for me to need it? It looks and feels very Web 0.9, like when I was first online back in the 1990’s with CompuServe.
What I had most problems with was ‘Thing 7 add feed from the 23 Things blog into your feed reader’. No matter how much I seeked and looked and scoured, there was no way that I could find that little orange button. Eventually I just copied and pasted it into the right area and was away. Later I saw that I did have the little orange button on some machines but not on others – the pitfalls of having lots of different PC’s with different builds, different versions of Windows and Explorer, etc. Still, got there in the end.
These functions got me thinking though – we set these up on a static / laptop PC but with the rise of the smart devices, how long will such services exist for? I really don’t know either way as much is new and not yet directly applicable to me on a continual basis. This will change (and is) but will the future hold services that seek you out as opposed to you having to add them to begin with? I stripped out nearly everything iGoogle had as a start page after all....
iGoogle is an interesting way to put lots of stuff on your google homepage but I don’t ‘get it’ yet. The other shoe has not yet dropped. I have not drunk the Kool Aid. The butter is still I the fridge. The metaphor is not yet a wholly positive one.
Experimentation is called for.
Sorry about not being clear on instructions re 'different browsers and machine may vary' you're right in that for a lot of site yo can just copy the url in, so good this worked for you.
ReplyDeleteiGoogle is dividing opinion. Some people find it very useful, others don't. You're right in that the more peopel use smart phones, apps, the less having a single page is appealing, but then again not everyone does have a shiny mobile device.
As for rss well it is a very useful tool for researchers so even if it doesn't work for you, it still good to know about it to recommend to researchers. I use it for journal ToC alerts, and to see what's new in my literature searches. Other people use it to get alerts for sale bargains.
You probably could have done with your tank in all that Glastonbury mud though!
Rowena 23 Things tEam