Pageflakes is sort of a "roll-your-own" portal service. When I first visited the page in Firefox (my "school" browser), it presented a bunch of widgets customized for Philadelphia: weather, news, sports, the usual. When I tried to change my location to Princeton, it presented me with an error, so I shrugged and surfed off elsewhere.
When I came back to Pageflakes later, though, it brought up results for Princeton after all. I should note that ALL of this was done without even having to register; no doubt Pageflakes uses cookies for this sort of thing.
The wigdets (or "flakes") cover a range of different news sources (old media and new)...newspapers, CNN, Digg, ESPN and CBS Sports for sports, among others. There's weather, local news headlines, movie and tv listings. If you click on the menu button at the top right of the screen, it pulls up a list of more widgets you can add; the "Fun" category includes MySpace, Facebook, horoscopes and "Hot or Not?" There are also non-internet content widgets of the sort I find as part of my Mac OS X operating system like world clock. You can create a blog or check e-mail, or import your Del.icio.us bookmarks. Adding a "flake" is very simple, though the "x-out" option in the window (if you want to delete it) is very tiny. You can find all the flakes here.
Again, I was able to play around with modifying Pageflakes (adding and deleting widgets) without registering for the service. The obvious sorts of content that you would find on a portal page (like your ISP's page, or iGoogle, or Yahoo!) are available, but if you dig deeper into the choices, you can find pagecasts on dog shows, condo issues, "African Diaspora fashion" and even the Legaspi family's photo album. These pagecasts look to be a feature that can be created by registered Pageflakes users. In this sense, Pageflakes is like other web organizations like Facebook that have opened up their platform to outside developers.
This is an interesting service, and I can see that it might be very handy for a library to create a low- or no-cost portal that could be highly customized to its needs.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Bloglines vs. Google Reader
I have to admit I've been using Google Reader for most of my RSS needs since spring or so. Before that, I used a Safari client that put feeds in my bookmarks, but that gave me more bookmarks than I wanted. I've found Google Reader to be very simple and intuitive to use, though there are sometimes multiple feeds to choose from. Occasionally I'll start it up and nothing will come up, too; I've never figured out the source of that problem but it goes away eventually.
I know that Bloglines is a popular reader, so I was happy to try it out. In practice, I think I may have drunk the Google Kool-Aid though, because the little differences between the two interfaces just annoy me (things aren't where I'm used to them being). The list of feeds is on the left side, just as in GR, but the main window displays a Bloglines blurb unless I've selected a feed. In GR, that window has a list of some recently-posted items from various feeds (complete with the first few lines so I can browse and decide if I want to read the whole thing) if I haven't selected a feed.
Some have said the Bloglines sign-up process is more cumbersome than GR, but if you don't have a Google account, I think it's about the same. The e-mail verification process is a pretty standard way of setting up an account these days and it didn't bother me any. Having three feeds to choose from in Bloglines is kind of startling, but sometimes GR will also list multiple feeds for one blog or news source.
In sum, I think the two services are fairly similar, but I'm used to Google Reader, so I'll stick with it. I might think about putting a Bloglines chicklet on my blogs, though.
I know that Bloglines is a popular reader, so I was happy to try it out. In practice, I think I may have drunk the Google Kool-Aid though, because the little differences between the two interfaces just annoy me (things aren't where I'm used to them being). The list of feeds is on the left side, just as in GR, but the main window displays a Bloglines blurb unless I've selected a feed. In GR, that window has a list of some recently-posted items from various feeds (complete with the first few lines so I can browse and decide if I want to read the whole thing) if I haven't selected a feed.
Some have said the Bloglines sign-up process is more cumbersome than GR, but if you don't have a Google account, I think it's about the same. The e-mail verification process is a pretty standard way of setting up an account these days and it didn't bother me any. Having three feeds to choose from in Bloglines is kind of startling, but sometimes GR will also list multiple feeds for one blog or news source.
In sum, I think the two services are fairly similar, but I'm used to Google Reader, so I'll stick with it. I might think about putting a Bloglines chicklet on my blogs, though.
Friday, September 26, 2008
Feed thoughts
So far I'm finding Feed to be an interesting and often funny book (I'm a little over halfway through it). Although it seems like a fanciful vision of the future, at least some of it concerns processes that are already well under way.
Some other real-life situations, such as consumer culture, the ever-extending reach of marketing and the desire of people to a) be cool and b) be able to turn to another source for support are not technological, but are fostered by the technologies around us and the ones in the book. I'd say that Feed is a good example of the "if this goes on..." school of science fiction. As someone who likes social software, but likes even more to be away from the computer with the cellphone off, I would consider this not the kind of future I would want to live in, even without the portents that Something Evil Is Afoot Behind the Scenes.
On a more frivolous note, I have to complain about an ornithological oversight in the book. The larger point of the passage I'm whining about is that birds such as hawks in cities were a symptom of the loss of their habitat elsewhere (it might actually be a symptom of hawk populations doing well enough that they can colonize previously unused habitats, but this would be a long digression calling for more research than I feel like doing right now!).
My main kvetch is with the line, "There were streets in the cities, and eagles flew over them, wobbling without moving their wings." If a large raptor-type bird flies that way, it's really a Turkey Vulture. Eagles don't wobble, in fact, their flight is about as steady as a jet airliner. These respective differences in flight style can allow a birder to make an identification from a considerable distance.
Of course, if I REALLY wanted to over-analyze this passage, I could say that it's presented as sort of an oral history (on the feed, no doubt), so maybe the "geezer" in question just wasn't good at bird identification. :)
- portability of data - more and more things are possible by using PDAs, phones and iPods, and more and more services have web-based interfaces (not hard drive-based ones) but what's more portable than being plugged directly into the network via your brain?
- customizing of one's computer experience - websites are falling over themselves to offer recommendations and browsing experiences tailored to the web surfer. The netizen can also customize his or her own experience by selecting what RSS feeds to read (say), rather than just taking a network news broadcast as it is. Titus himself is customized by his parents before his birth, perhaps the logical conclusion to the current research obsession of linking genes to specific traits and propensities.
- privacy issues - following on from the point above, websites can offer customized experiences by collecting data about their users, both overtly and covertly. The initial incident where Titus and his friends are literally rebooted in order to stop the hacker is perhaps the logical extreme of this process.
Some other real-life situations, such as consumer culture, the ever-extending reach of marketing and the desire of people to a) be cool and b) be able to turn to another source for support are not technological, but are fostered by the technologies around us and the ones in the book. I'd say that Feed is a good example of the "if this goes on..." school of science fiction. As someone who likes social software, but likes even more to be away from the computer with the cellphone off, I would consider this not the kind of future I would want to live in, even without the portents that Something Evil Is Afoot Behind the Scenes.
On a more frivolous note, I have to complain about an ornithological oversight in the book. The larger point of the passage I'm whining about is that birds such as hawks in cities were a symptom of the loss of their habitat elsewhere (it might actually be a symptom of hawk populations doing well enough that they can colonize previously unused habitats, but this would be a long digression calling for more research than I feel like doing right now!).
My main kvetch is with the line, "There were streets in the cities, and eagles flew over them, wobbling without moving their wings." If a large raptor-type bird flies that way, it's really a Turkey Vulture. Eagles don't wobble, in fact, their flight is about as steady as a jet airliner. These respective differences in flight style can allow a birder to make an identification from a considerable distance.
Of course, if I REALLY wanted to over-analyze this passage, I could say that it's presented as sort of an oral history (on the feed, no doubt), so maybe the "geezer" in question just wasn't good at bird identification. :)
Saturday, September 20, 2008
UMD Library Learning 2.0
Learning 2.0 seems to be a trend or a project being used by a number of institutions. While surfing the web, I found the Learning 2.0 page at the University of Minnesota. It has a lot of good posts about using Web 2.0 tools. The interface is clean and attractive, and the blogging voice is friendly and supportive (also with a touch of humor: see the post about Getting Things Done).
Another thing that reinforces this particular blog's impact is that the University of Minnesota has a site linking to all blogs throughout the institution. Just search on "library" on this page, and find a whole range of library blogs within the university! I do wish there was a better way to browse all these blogs than just alphabetically (like a subject categorization). Still, by linking these blogs into a multi-blog "collection", the university can leverage its information and make it easier for someone to find information. It's a way of centralizing the inherently de-centralized information universe of the blog.
Another thing that reinforces this particular blog's impact is that the University of Minnesota has a site linking to all blogs throughout the institution. Just search on "library" on this page, and find a whole range of library blogs within the university! I do wish there was a better way to browse all these blogs than just alphabetically (like a subject categorization). Still, by linking these blogs into a multi-blog "collection", the university can leverage its information and make it easier for someone to find information. It's a way of centralizing the inherently de-centralized information universe of the blog.
Friday, September 19, 2008
Blogger vs. WordPress
I've been on Blogger since late 2004; I have a birding blog under my own name and a food blog under a pseudonym there. I have no previous experience with WordPress, apart from reading other blogs created with it and thinking, "My, that looks spiffy!" The version of WordPress I'm using for this exercise is the free hosted version, because I'm a poor grad student with a mortgage to boot (at least it's not an adjustable-rate mortgage!).
Hmm. As I'm typing this, I see that Blogger's spellcheck flags the couldn part of couldn't as a typo.
All in all, WordPress has lots of nice extra options to play with (possibly too many). The next time I feel impelled to start a new blog, I might give it a whirl.
Oh, yeah, and the WordPress testy blog is here.
- The "Categories" option was always one of the things I envied non-Blogger blogging programs like WordPress. Blogger has added tags since I was a newbie blogger, but it is still really nice to set up some general categories to sort your posts (rather than having to remember to stick to consistent nomenclature yourself). Since blogs publish in reverse chronological order, indexing blog posts has always been an issue.
- WordPress has more and cooler (ok, maybe "more literary-looking" is a better phrase) templates.
- WordPress also gives you a different window when you want to preview a post before publishing. Since it is really easy to lose a post unintentionally in Blogger when toggling between preview and editing views in the same window, WordPress' solution is a very nice touch.
- When I added a photo to a post from my hard drive, I was impressed with the extra layout options (not available in Blogger, other than simple alignment of the image). However, once I had uploaded the photo and wanted to add text to the post, I couldn't; when I clicked around in the posting window, nothing took. I had to switch to HTML view (rather than "Visual" view) to create a post. But when I went back and edited the post, I was able to insert the extra text fine. This may be my problem rather than WordPress' problem.
Hmm. As I'm typing this, I see that Blogger's spellcheck flags the couldn part of couldn't as a typo.
- Back to the bulleted list. Another nice feature from WordPress is a button to insert a "more" line and break up a post. This way you can easily put in just the beginning of your post, then have your reader follow along "below the jump." This is a good way of displaying more posts on your main blog page (or keeping dicey content a little more hidden, or just building suspense). On the other hand, it demands an extra click from your reader (bloggers argue about this post structure a lot).
- I tried inserting photos from my Flickr account, but that started getting too complicated, so I gave up. Flickr photos usually work better if you're in Flickr and use the "Blog This" button anyway.
All in all, WordPress has lots of nice extra options to play with (possibly too many). The next time I feel impelled to start a new blog, I might give it a whirl.
Oh, yeah, and the WordPress testy blog is here.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Home Alone
Disclaimer: I read The Social Life of Technology earlier this year. I found it to be a well-argued, thought-provoking book.
Home Alone is filled with perceptions about computer use in society, to the point that it's impossible to distill every valuable insight into one short blog post. Still, two overall themes jump out at me.
The first is that when technology collides with human nature, human nature always wins. It doesn't matter how cool, elegant, functional or worthy the technology is; if it doesn't fit into what people want and are willing to do, it will fail. Brown and Duguid's example of hot-desking at Chiat/Day is filled with examples of how workers found this innovation to be hostile to their working process, and how they fought back. (This section also demonstrates how stubborn and resourceful people can be when their accustomed way of doing things is disrupted by something that they have defined as "no good reason".)
The lesson libraries should take from this is that any successful technology initiative is rooted at its core in a deep understanding of the group(s) that will be using it. As Brown and Duguid say about Alexander Graham Bell's process of "socializing" the telephone, "Though the telephone was a transformative technology, Bell nonetheless worked with the social context of his day, not against it." Libraries should know their patrons and community well before they attempt to implement a new technology (even one that has been successful at other libraries), or they risk wasting time and resources (or, at worst, alienating their public).
The other point that I take from this reading is that it can be hard to perceive computer technology accurately. On one hand, there is hype about anything new and shiny (in the book, hot-desking, but it's pervasive when one considers Web 2.0). On the other hand, the home computer is such a ubiquitous and mundane presence that the "home office" would seem to be a simple thing to create. This idea assumes that the individual and his/her computer are enough, while totally ignoring the business infrastructure (both technological and social) that supports a worker sitting at a computer in a corporation. (I'm currently experiencing this firsthand as I slowly work through self-installing DSL at home!) This combined exoticism/mundaneity just complicates the task of those who are designing computer systems, especially if they are not IT professionals themselves (say, librarians trying to design a system that will work for their patrons). The socialization of the computer is a slow and bumpy process, and one that is far from complete.
Home Alone is filled with perceptions about computer use in society, to the point that it's impossible to distill every valuable insight into one short blog post. Still, two overall themes jump out at me.
The first is that when technology collides with human nature, human nature always wins. It doesn't matter how cool, elegant, functional or worthy the technology is; if it doesn't fit into what people want and are willing to do, it will fail. Brown and Duguid's example of hot-desking at Chiat/Day is filled with examples of how workers found this innovation to be hostile to their working process, and how they fought back. (This section also demonstrates how stubborn and resourceful people can be when their accustomed way of doing things is disrupted by something that they have defined as "no good reason".)
The lesson libraries should take from this is that any successful technology initiative is rooted at its core in a deep understanding of the group(s) that will be using it. As Brown and Duguid say about Alexander Graham Bell's process of "socializing" the telephone, "Though the telephone was a transformative technology, Bell nonetheless worked with the social context of his day, not against it." Libraries should know their patrons and community well before they attempt to implement a new technology (even one that has been successful at other libraries), or they risk wasting time and resources (or, at worst, alienating their public).
The other point that I take from this reading is that it can be hard to perceive computer technology accurately. On one hand, there is hype about anything new and shiny (in the book, hot-desking, but it's pervasive when one considers Web 2.0). On the other hand, the home computer is such a ubiquitous and mundane presence that the "home office" would seem to be a simple thing to create. This idea assumes that the individual and his/her computer are enough, while totally ignoring the business infrastructure (both technological and social) that supports a worker sitting at a computer in a corporation. (I'm currently experiencing this firsthand as I slowly work through self-installing DSL at home!) This combined exoticism/mundaneity just complicates the task of those who are designing computer systems, especially if they are not IT professionals themselves (say, librarians trying to design a system that will work for their patrons). The socialization of the computer is a slow and bumpy process, and one that is far from complete.
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