iGoogle

After initally setting up my iGoogle page, I had quite a bit of fun exploring the different gadgets available, choosing a 'theme' and rearranging my page! Searching for library 'stuff', I found the vast majority of gadgets available were American, but I was happy to be able to add the Cambridge Libraries Widget! Creating a 'Library Gadgets' tab was fairly straightforward, and I can see that the use of tabs is an excellent way to organise different subjects into neat folders, and de-clutter the home screen. I think it's great to have a single page which contains such useful tools as library catalogues, google maps, Wikipedia, Gmail, and the weather forecast, and it would definitely make a useful home page.

My iGoogle Page

However, I find the page can be very slow to load, and I am not so keen on using it as a means of managing rss feeds. I find that Bloglines works well, as it clearly displays new items and allows you to save any that you want to read again, or don't have time to finish looking at. From what I can see, you need to have a good look at the rss feed boxes on the iGoogle page to identify new items, which would be fairly time consuming if you had lots! I suppose Google Reader is a more suitable tool for managing large numbers of RSS feeds, and is therefore quite similar to Bloglines.

Overall, I found this a very interesting exercise as I hadn't really heard much about Start pages before. As a means of pulling together and organising useful tools and information from the vast amount of material that is available on the web, and allowing the creation of a single collection that is relevant to an individual, I think it is a highly valuable device.