"A doodle. I do doodle. You too. You do doodle too."

I have to confess it - I love Doodle, in fact I love it so much I quote from the Buffyverse to introduce it.

I was introduced to it by Delve and Discover a few months ago as a means to organise a meet up of around nine people. It is a brilliant tool if you need to find out when people can do, rather than actually organising the whole meeting/event which can be done alongside Doodle with emails, texts and perhaps even a good old fashioned chat!

Not having to enter a password is key to this of course - anyone with an internet connection can be included with Doodle, rather than anyone with an internet connection who is willing to register. It takes about two minutes clicking to select when you can attend, which you can edit later if plans change. I also like how entirely user determined it is - you can enter attendees as couples or multiple names and can select a number of different times when initially setting up the event. I had a brief look at Tungle.me and it was handy you could log in through a different account password - such as Twitter, you still have to log in which makes the process more complicated. Similarly, with Meet-O-Matic, although you can set up a meeting without logging in you can't use the advanced options such as selecting multiple times of day.

The genius of Doodle is its simplicity in solving an annoying but small problem. I can't see Doodle ever taking off for organising meet ups with one or two people but when trying to get big groups of people with lots of other commitments together it is hugely useful. I really like it when technology makes things easier and Doodle does that.

Blog blog blog

When I originally logged into my Google account at the start of 23 things, I had a brief moment of panic where I decided the internet is definitely a BAD THING whose purpose is to hold embarrassing information to be rediscovered later in life. And not just those photos on Facebook that make my face look 'squishy' in the words of one of my friends. I found a blog I kept back in the day, otherwise known as around 2004. I don't think it's quite as bad as The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, but I still wanted to make sure I had removed all trace of teenage confessions from public view before releasing more of my 'blogging' on the world.

My old blog pretty much had the purpose of a diary - a way of keeping up with friends, sharing photographs etc. before Facebook made all that easy. Writing a blog for 23 Things - which should have some sort of point and content rather than just musings - is hopefully going to be more useful (and also hopefully won't, in six years time, be hideously embarrassing, although there is still time!).

I find Blogger fairly user friendly, especially when just writing posts: automatically saving drafts every so often is a brilliant feature which anyone who has ever lost a long email through a bad internet connection or accidental page refresh will appreciate. I also love the new template designer, which allows lovely background images - there is no rhyme or reason why I chose cliffs, except I like them and having a picture of the tweed library suit from the Mighty Boosh would have been a bit too psychedelic for me! The template designer also makes it easier to change things like post layout and where the gadgets display on the page.

I now just need to start this blogging malarkey properly and get up to date with the things!

RSS-sssssssssss feeds

As the news came in last week that snake numbers are declining worldwide, I couldn't resist making my blog title reference this!

I have used RSS feeds before, having set myself up a Google Reader account a few months ago. This was mostly to scan for stories about libraries in the news and following interesting librarian blogs before my library school interviews so that I could keep an eye on any news stories they might ask me about.

I particularly liked the way you could make an RSS feed of keyword searches on the BBC news website, which is a brilliantly lazy way of looking out for interesting news stories. I love that little orange square! Although when I went to have a play for 23 Things I noticed that the BBC search doesn't support this any more. If there are any wonderfully teccy people who know how to save keyword searches on sites that don't have the magic orange square I'd be really pleased to know about it.

Since going to my interviews I have to say that I haven't looked at Reader that often. I find that it is easy to organise different feeds and look at the ones of interest on Google Reader so I can just dip in and out. I was excited that I could subscribe to all of the Cambridge 23 Things blogs at once though - thanks to Girl in the Moon! I really like being able to scan all the blogs and being able to see which ones I have looked at although I'm unfortunately not going to have anywhere near enough time to read them all properly!

My instinct is that RSS feeds could be usefully utilised within libraries, in certain situations. I like the feature to be able to create a feed and then share it with others - this could be of use for collecting relevant feeds together for researchers, although obviously they would have to happy to get a RSS reader (or iGoogle or similar of course) themselves. It is essentially a very logical way of collecting together information which will be of use and/or interest on the net. This won't replace actively searching for information, or browsing, which can throw up unexpected items of interest, but is a useful addition to other research methods.

iGoogle, I get distracted

I had used iGoogle before - I assume the nice little button saying either 'try' and/or 'new' caught me in the right mood. Never having logged in again since my initial play I felt I should give a bit of time to explore it properly.

So I created a general homepage adding Twitter, Facebook, email, news headlines as well as retaining some of the standard gadgets like Google Maps.

I was also a little bit too excited on discovering that the theme I'd selected (of penguins) could be complimented by little animated penguins on the main page. I felt this was a good thing even though I can't really explain why.

I think this may be the problem for me of using iGoogle, it seems very high tech and convenient to be able to check social media and email in one space, but, for similar reasons as why I don't Tweet on my phone, I don't actually like that level of permanent distraction.

I also felt the gadgets themselves didn't work that well - I haven't been able to remove the 'dark shadow' (which sounds lovely and Gothic) off the Facebook gadget. Clicking through from the gadget sends you to the mobile interface, which isn't as clear as the regular Facebook display, so I would then just log into regular Facebook to see whatever it was that caught my attention, which rather defeats the point. The Twitter gadget worked a lot better although, as Library Wanderer points out, the delay in updates still makes the main Twitter site the best way to follow what's happening.

Although I didn't like using iGoogle at home, I felt having a launch page at work might be more useful. I really liked the ability to create multiple landing pages so set up a 'Library' tab. To this I added the COPAC search box, as suggested by 23 things and which I wouldn't have though of searching for myself, a currency converter, a few RSS feeds and Google Translate. This seems to make more sense than the glowing lava lamp of distraction that is my main page, as having these things on one page should save time.


Again though I had problems with the gadget on iGoogle not working as well as the main page - looking something up on the map gadget, for example, you couldn't click through to Google Streetview. I found this quite annoying and again sent me back to Google maps proper, as I love being able to see where I'm supposed to be going as well as having the map.

I think perhaps I'd be more inclined to carry on using iGoogle at work if some of the gadgets were improved, on the whole though, moving penguins on my homepage are a stage too far for me!

Going all 2.0 for 23 things

My previous web 2.0 experiences have almost entirely been based on the important business of chattering and generally keeping in touch with friends and family: on Facebook and blogs, following events as they happen and sharing the news on Twitter, exchanging photos with my extended family via Flikr and commenting on friends’ videos on Youtube.

As a current graduate trainee I’m really eager to see how some of these technologies might be usefully utilised in libraries – which 23 Things Cambridge will nudge me into thinking about.

I do think that web 2.0 has a role to play for modern libraries and modern librarians. This is partly because it has become such a big part of day to day life for me: I check Facebook more regularly than any other website, it acts as not only my main personal email account but also as an addition to my diary (helpfully reminding me of friends’ birthdays and events). I can’t see why Facebook and Twitter, or something as yet unimagined which may ultimately replace them, will ever stop being used when so entertaining and handy.

How and when these technologies can be valuably used in libraries is another question, and I’m hoping to develop my skills of judging whether the tools I’ve used already can be helpful in a professional context, as well as (hopefully) discovering some new ones.