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Thing 2 - RSS feeds.  I am subscribed to a number of RSS feeds but in Internet Explorer you have to remember to check them so I thought this could be a good use for igoogle.  Adding individual feeds worked well but adding the google reader was not so helpful.  It mixed all the feeds up and as most of the current ones were new books added to our library catalogue it wasn't that interesting.  Also not many could be displayed in the small box.

It did seem useful having all the feeds together so I am now going to explore google reader separately rather than within igoogle.  When I have checked out some other blogs I may find some other useful rss feed readers to try.

After not being won over by igoogle I thought I would try netvibes.  My first experience of that was recently when CILIP created a page for their "big conversation".  I thought I would set one up with rss feeds and web searches that might be useful for my library.   This is the video section of the page:

Now this is where the librarian in me was shouting out for controlled language and had to be held in check by the web2.0 explorer telling me to "go with the flow".  First to choose an image on the top I tried "classics" and waded through a number of images of some beautiful and not so beautiful cars.  A change of search term to classical studies delivered up alot of images of Egypt and finally a classical temple which I chose.  Then netvibes kindly defaulted me various gadgets straight away.  Some useful some not.  It populated them with my search term and allowed me to edit this.  On reaching videos I was faced with a horror film but apparently a "classic" one so that was alright.

I need to explore netvibes more but think it could be useful if I search for good sites and then add the rss feeds directly rather than relying on automatic searching.  The tab system it uses I find more intuitive than google as it follows the layout of browsers.