Thing 1 continued: Good (Net)Vibrations

After giving iGoogle a go and coming away distinctly underwhelmed, I thought, "Wouldn't it be Nice if there was a similar kind of platform, but one that provides a clearer, cleaner and more flexible interface?"

A more traditional dashboard than the
ones we're playing with
Photo: http://www.dragondriving.co.uk

It's not quite as intuitive to use, but with Netvibes there is no cluttered sidebar or slavish adherence to the promotion of Google products; instead the only tabs are user-created and line up along the top of the "dashboard" (which I'm rapidly realising is the web 2.0 buzzword - quite a departure from its original meaning, which was a barrier of wood or leather fixed at the front of a horse-drawn carriage or sleigh to protect the driver from mud which would literally dash itself against the board). The selection of widgets on offer is also much wider and generally more useful - as ever, you do have to be careful about the searchterms you use - the results for "blogger" were particularly interesting - but I found them much easier to manipulate, as you can choose how they display new material (headline, slideshow, news ticker) and my particular favourite was a 'link widget' which allows you to turn websites which may not have widgets into bookmarks on your dashboard, meaning that everything can be attached to the dashboard and will help break the habit of defaulting to my browser-based favourites.

Geeking out with language tools on Netvibes

I also played around with the tabs on Netvibes, creating a Travel tab (thanks for the idea Jenny), a Blogs tab for all my RSS feeds (I'm a complete newbie on this one but hopefully Thing 3 will clue me up), and a Languages tab for all the dictionaries and translators I usually use (iate.europa.eu and dict.leo.org are respectable, I request any serious linguists not to judge me for using WordReference though!) I do some freelance translation and proofreading, as well as being lucky enough to use my foreign languages regularly in the Classics library, so having all those tools at one glance will be incredibly useful. Not to mention that the strawberry theme will be Keepin' the Summer Alive all year round.

I haven't yet ventured out into the wide world of public pages, à la Annie, but I'm becoming increasingly comfortable with the new things I'm encountering, which bodes well for the rest of the programme, extending All Summer Long...

Thing 1: Google goggles on...or off?

One of my favourite Google doodles to date: taking inspiration
from the great dancer, Martha Graham (seen 11th May 2011)

Being a longterm devotee of Gmail, I have had some experience with other Google products, such as Google docs and Blogger and have generally found them simple and satisfying to use - taking Gmail as an example, it blew Hotmail and Yahoo out of the water by keeping emails in conversations, by being far less prone to bugs and spam, and by allowing you to log in to other services without having 101 usernames and passwords. The way that it marks different correspondents in different colours also greatly appealed to my girly side.

Google's reputation for innovation and imagination (not to mention imperiousness and monopoly) is fearsome, yet one innovation that had not yet reached me was iGoogle. On my home computer I have my trusty favourites bar (and a subconscious order in which I visit each link) which mostly consists of Hermes, Gmail, Facebook and BBC Sport. These four sites must constitute around 95% of the sites I visit, and are generally the source of inspiration for the other 5%. For this reason, iGoogle appealed in that it would even minimise the four clicks it usually takes me to get around, and could well act as a new kind of segway into other sources of information.

The utterly pointless real age calculator.
That's not my real age, just to be clear...

I found the groundwork for iGoogle to be pretty easy (aside from the theme, which kept randomly changing on me), but I was somewhat underwhelmed by the result, as I gather many other 23Thingers have been. It is handy to have my lines of contact at a glance, but the rest of the stuff was lost on me, as I either wasn't interested in what happened to be showing at the time, or couldn't see enough of it for it to have an impact, so I ended up going on the parent site anyway. The proliferation of widgets was something else which put a dampener on it, as it seemed to be quite difficult to root out the quality from the slews of rubbish such as the "real age calculator" (put in your date of birth and we'll tell you how old you are...no, really...)

Grand Corps Malade: Roi du slam
français (photo: www.glenscolan.fr)

As iGoogle didn't really do it for me, I'm currently in the middle of taking a leaf out of Annie's book and trying something different - I'm also going for Netvibes, which, despite being a lot more complicated at face value, is already providing more for me in terms of widgets and feeds which fit my interests. I was greatly surprised at the number of hits for Slam poetry, something I'm returning to after first encountering it on my year abroad (sorry about the French link, but it describes the French slam scene better than the English link). Just wait 'til podcast week!

But until then, I'll get back to you on my Netvibe travails, as piles of cataloguing are eyeing me maliciously...