Google iNdigestion

Is there anything you can't do with google?

My igoogle page has my custom search engines, local weather, Melbourne maps, google book search, my facebook, my selection of news, gadgets to search librarians' book reviews, my own gadgets I can share with others, all presented in a style I have chosen to make me feel good and which I can change at any time...

Google goodies

Google docs

Experienced a few problems getting google docs to work properly in the work browser. I googled for a solution - putting "s" for secure in front of the address (https://docs.google.com) and refreshing a few times seems to work.

Apart from the ability to log on anywhere and access documents, I like the Publish as a web page and Publish directly to blog facilities.

Google doc helps with formatting

• I was able to copy a web page into Google docs then publish it to a Wordpress blog and it retained all the formatting. When I tried pasting the web page directly into the blog a lot of the formatting was lost.

Google maps

Lots of fun and amazingly powerful.

Spoilt for choice?

Pubs in Brunswick

Google books

Another amazing service, offering limited previews, selected full text of out of copyright works...fun and useful but I still don't like reading onscreen.

Lost in Myspace

I have done a walking tour of some of the Library Myspaces on the list and now feel very old. I can see a role for event promotion but it gets a bit lost in the "be my friend" networking and author self promotion. I eargerly clicked on the UCF Ask a Librarian - we use the "Ask a librarian" tag ourselves - but other than a quick service description it only offered more of the same.

Happy to admit I may be missing something and/or the solution is still waiting for a problem. I can't see much immediate value for this library.

Library 2.0 on ning has a bit more to offer- it has some structure, and a clearer purpose.

Signed up for Facebook as Ned Kelly - along with a lot of other "characters" using the name (I'm the talking horse one with 0 friends). It classified me as a State Government of Victoria employeee on the basis of my email address! Its not a paddock I expect to spend much time in.

Gasp - I missed a "thing"

Must have been too busy reading...

have now made a start with a book that features librarians as minor players :

RSS feeds and the Best Paper.Ever

I have a Bloglines account where I keep an assortment of feeds to provide me with information for the weekly Report Watch alerts., and a Google Reader account focusing on journals - one day I will decide between the two (or maybe not).

The best paper. ever? (found it in 43 folders blog)

Another blog

I have set up another blog to give staff of an agency, who aren't on our intranet , access to some free resources. Because I was cutting and pasting I had the usual problems with formatting and layout but it came up looking ok with minimal effort.

With a bit of effort in the Edit Html view (pasting code generated by Google) I incorporated a Google custom search engine for Australian departments. It is very like the Rollyo one but you can give Google some extra words to emphasise in the results. I am trying "policy".