I think RSS feeds are great - they help me to keep up to date with the latest ideas and developments in the library world and beyond. I mainly subscribe to library and technology based feeds and find them a good source of inspiration. Overtime I have dabbled with a number of different RSS readers including Netvibes and Bloglines - but in recent years I have settled with Google Reader as my reader of choice. It has a really clear interface and the ease of subscribing to feeds is great. My biggest challenge with RSS feeds is finding the time to go through them. The great thing about 23 things is that it has made me look at my feeds and sort through the way I store them to enable me to see what ones I need to read daily, weekly or monthly. I also want to investigate keeping up to date with feeds on my smartphone - something I have not yet thought about doing.
iGoogle
I do not use dashboards that much but they are pretty useful - especially when I am delivering sessions on web2. iGoogle is a great one-stop shop bringing in links to all the different accounts that I use including Google Reader, Google docs, Facebook, Twitter, BBC news and my emails to name a few. In fact this course has made me revisit my iGoogle account and remember just how useful it is! I make use of the tabs and have different widgets for different needs under each tab. The idea of sharing pages is interesting too - but not something I have dabbled with.
The start.warwick pages seem to be going down well with students - recently in meetings and training I have heard several students discuss this tool with a lot of enthusiasm.These students like the concept of being able to access all their Warwick accounts (including the Library search 'gadget') in one place together with access to their Facebook account, email and other information.
Right I am off to revisit some old tools that I have neglected over the past few months and to sort out my feeds.
