Week 4, Thing #8

I used Bloglines for several feeds, searching through some recommended on School Library Learning 2.0 and some recommended from within Bloglines. Google Reader is in place on my iGoogle page, so several of the feeds overlap. I am used to Google Reader and do not see a reason to switch unless Google starts charging, goes out of business, or otherwise fails. I have used Reader for several years and depend on it to bring me updates on all things library. While I was at Bloglines, I spent time in NetVibes as well. I felt they were feeding me content--much of which I did not like--and I had to delete material before looking for what I was interested in using.

Using feeds on a school library or classroom website could be very useful. Articles about the latest technologies, the state of many school libraries, author information, and world news made available directly to followers and patrons in a format that appeals to them....

Most of my web content is not clearly differentiated between my professional and private selves. I see a need to do that.

I have not used an RSS feed for personal interests. I think it is time. I went through the Google Reader tutorials to get up to speed. My iGoogle account is set up with a calendar, Google Docs, Reader, weather, calculators, etc. I don't feel any reason to make my interests public immediately. I might do that on a separate page, or by making certain feeds public. Sharing economic, health, travel, and local and national news with friends and family members often gets shortchanged because of time; we will have to get on board.

At the end of the Discovery Resources a suggestion was made that we post about Google Gears. I realized that I had nothing about Gears in for quite awhile. According to Wikipedia,

On February 19, 2010, the Gears team at Google announced that the development of Google Gears had stopped, as they are working on bringing all of the Gears capabilities into web standards like HTML5. Although development of new features has ceased, Google are planning to continue supporting Gears until they have developed a "simple, comprehensive" method for users' data to be migrated to HTML5 features.^[29]

Last summer (or was it spring?), I took an Infopeople course on Cloud computing, looking at a variety of apps. I have been using Delicious for years, but suddenly the glories of Diigo are being paraded by folks in the know. It will be sometime, if ever, before I migrate to Diigo. As with many things, a little added convenience may not make up for the time it takes to teach the fingers to do the walking. And, who knows, Diigo may be bought out by a bigger brother and turned into an app less applicable.