Thing 2: RSS

I don't remember when I first started subscribing to RSS feeds. I also don't remember when I set up the iGoogle page I have, or the Google Reader feeds. Once I looked at them again (and Netvibes), I remembered why I'm not using them.

I love RSS feeds! They let me put all the stuff I read regularly into one spot. The first RSS tool I tried was, I think, Bloglines. I didn't like their website layout. That led me to look for an RSS software solution, and I was using a little program called, simply, RSS Reader. At some point it died for me (some kind of incompatibility), and I switched to Feedreader. The biggest downside to Feedreader is that I have to manually export/import the .opml file to each computer I use it on if I want the same feeds in each instance. It can be installed to and run off a USB stick, however.

The need to update the subscriptions on each installation is why I first looked at Google Reader, but the loss of some functionality ultimately made me decide to stick with Feedreader. The comparison:

• Organization: You can create folders in both, but there's limited folder management in Google Reader. You can delete or change sharing options in the folder management, but you can't add them there; you have to click on a feed and manually tag it to make a folder, after which you can drag and drop items in, or later tag them while they're selected. Feedreader uses standard right-click/create-folder functions, as well as having a menu option for creating new folders or feeds. I prefer to preload most of my folders, especially if I decide to seriously recategorize things.
• Import/Export: The export functions for both Google Reader and Feedreader are pretty much identical in function. Get into the menus, export a file. Google's saves by default as an .xml file, and Feedreader's as an .opml. Importing in Google Reader is similarly simple, but if you've already subscribed to a feed, Google may add it anyway, and it may or may not put it in the folder it was in in the import. Feedreader uses a smart import: it only imports feeds you don't have, lets you selectively import in case you only want to import some of them, and if you have folder names matching the ones in the export in the import location, it puts the feeds there automatically. This is why importing files around between Feedreader installations is relatively painless.
• Sharing: It's much easier to share items in Google; Feedreader being a standalone means it's not tied in with all of Google's host of products. You have the option to email articles if you configure the mail settings, but not entire feeds, although Google's version of sharing entire feeds is for you to make public that you follow them. The actual "share" option only applies to individual items.
• Adding feeds: Both Feedreader and Google Reader make it easy to add feeds; Google's option sort of has a search option, but depending how well-known the site you're looking for is, it might be faster to just copy and paste the feed URL into the subscribe box. In Feedreader, F3 will pull a URL from your clipboard into the subscribe box. The important difference: Feedreader will tell you if you already subscribe; Google Reader will just add the duplicate feed.

I also looked at both Internet Explorer's and Firefox's RSS bookmarking options, and of the two, I vastly prefer Internet Explorer's, mostly for ease of reading. Unfortunately, that would mean I have to use Internet Explorer, and for general web browsing, I vastly prefer Firefox. (Although given the changes in Firefox 4.0, which I reverted back to 3.6.16 after 15 minutes of frustration at how buggy a release version was, Internet Explorer may become a rosy option if Firefox 3.x ever goes away.)

I haven't used RSS feeds in Outlook because that function is disabled on our campus, and I have an older version of Outlook at home.

RSS summary: Google Reader is great if you read a feeds on a lot of computers and you can't or don't want to install a program that you need to manually synchronize. If you get frustrated by its options, there are other options out there. I tend to prefer Feedreader for ease of organization and duplicate feed management; if you're a heavy sharer, however, Google Reader is probably more convenient.

Now, on to iGoogle and Netvibes. There's a really short answer why I wouldn't use either of these options for RSS feeds: screen space. Netvibes seems to paginate after a certain number of items. iGoogle gets scrolly really fast. I subscribe to a couple hundred feeds; it's just not practical.

Dashboards in general don't work for me. We have Angel on our campus (it's a course management software), and it has a dashboard option. I looked at all the default Netvibes dashboards, and I played with the one I had apparently set up in iGoogle at some point (which was kind of cool - I was able to use one of my own pictures as a header image). I added and rearranged widgets and subscribed to feeds. I looked at the Dublin City Libraries' page. All in all, they're just too busy for me.

I'm easily distracted. I have ten icons on my work desktop; only two are a direct shortcuts to a program, and once ILLiad 7.x goes away more or less for good, I'll take that icon off my quick launch toolbar and put 8 down there, and just Internet Explorer will be left there. (I leave it there since I only use it for Banner access.) I'm a heavy user of the quick launch bar, and I put almost all the icons that land on my desktop in a folder called "Shortcuts." I then added my desktop as a menu to my taskbar, and can access all the shortcuts as a sort of personalized start menu. Programs I use regularly end up on the quick launch bar.

In a way this correlates with how I use my browser; I'm a heavy user of bookmarks, and I keep eight or ten tabs open across the top. I don't try to focus on more than one page at a time. The tabs I have open aren't the kinds of things I could compile onto a dashboard, because they're not set up to be - they're things like our text-a-librarian interface (which has its own dashboard option for reference - also not using), our ILLiad server's PDF folder (I often check manually if something uploaded), Angel (again with its own dashboard option), the SUNYLA website (for editing), our Reserves interface, and so forth.

Basically: Putting all those boxes on a page makes it hard for me to focus on one. I do better with peripheral icons and a single piece of content, with menus to get to things I use less frequently.

Our library's catalog doesn't have a widget or gadget that I can find; somewhat surprisingly, there isn't an option for the SUNY-wide catalog, either. There is a WorldCat search option, which pushes you out to WorldCat.org for the search results, and with WorldCat local can give you local results. Hm... That's something to explore.

The Dublin City Libraries page was interesting; they have so much useful information they've added by including del.icio.us bookmarks and widgets. And then they link over to their website, which confuses me. What's the benefit of having the Netvibes site when they also have a website? If you go to google.ie and search for the Dublin City Libraries, you get their website on the first page of results, and the Netvibes page over on the second page of results. All the content that seems to be unique to the Netvibes site, rather than linking to items found on their website, are below the fold, so to speak. It would have made more sense to me to put the unique content on the introductory Netvibes page at the top, or to just have it all on their website via RSS includes. Basically, I don't understand why someone would go to the Netvibes page. It's not at all easy to find their Netvibes site from their website. Perhaps the website is not freely controlled by the librarians, and they are using Netvibes to offer additional web resources they can't easily on their website.

There's an advantage of Netvibes over iGoogle: you can create a public site. With iGoogle, you're tied to a personal log-in and are making an entirely personal homepage. Netvibes lets you build an entirely public site for sharing web resources. It's more dynamic than just "here's a bunch of links to news sites," since you can give your patrons a couple recent headlines, as well, or updates from a database on a topic. If your website is locked down by ITS and not flexible for adding content like RSS feeds, del.icio.us bookmarks, and such, you can create an online portal for your users. I think it would be a lot more useful if it were more obviously linked from the library's homepage, though.

Dashboards summary: Not for me personally, but for libraries, a public dashboard could be a way to extend dynamic web content if it's not possible to do so on their own websites.