Thing 29: Google Tools

So many options, so little time. What to play with first?

I started with Google News. I'd used Newsvine for my news ever since Thing 12--which is to say, I'd used Newsvine for a while, finding it to be the least obnoxious of the social media sites, and eventually reverted to picking up headlines here and there instead. Dang it, I don't want my media to be social. I rarely even read the reader comments attached to a news story. Using Newsvine or Digg or the other social media sites was like trying to read the newspaper while sitting in a room filled with people I didn't know calling back and forth to each other about what they'd just read or had seen online or whatever: hard to concentrate. Hmph. >:(

This Thing was the first I'd heard of Google News (I suppose it's listed on various Google pages, but it hadn't caught my attention), and I was wary--please, not another social media site! Much to my relief, Google is going to try to customize the news to what it thinks I want to read, not the most popular news of a bunch of people I may have nothing in common with.

My initial reaction leans toward the positive. It'll take a while to get used to the layout, but it always takes me a while to do that. I mean, I'm not entirely used to Newsvine's layout, and that's been how many months? Google's preference for simple layouts serves them well here, although the sheer number of links on the page is pushing that simplicity to the limits. There were a couple of glitches--for example, I tried to sign up for the local news of St. Paul, MN and ended up with the local news of a St. Paul somewhere in Canada--but they were worked out quickly. I liked the timeline feature, although when I clicked on what I thought was a story from 2004, I ended up with one from 2008. And ye gods, I'm lazy: it feels like such an effort to scroll down and get the news past the first part of the screen!

For productivity tools (oh goody, we're back to productivity tools!), I chose Gmail. I've been using Gmail for a while, actually; it's the email I've been using for all the Things that demand registration. I did a bit with labels back when I used this email for mailing lists, but that was about as far as my experimentation got. But for a while now, I've been thinking that this may become my main email address, and so it was time to take a closer look at it. I'd never poked into the Labs that I can recall. Now I've done so and have set up the gadget that warns you that you might be about to send an email without its attachment. And now I know why some emails have a > in front of them while others have a >>. Cool.

Drawbacks? Well, I'm still on dial-up at home, and Gmail is definitely oriented toward high-speed connections. Yes, there's the option to go for basic HTML, which delivers the mail just fine, but a lot of the fun features disappear (and no visiting the Labs while you're on basic HTML). I'm still a bit cautious about storing my main email online forever--never mind that I've had how many computers crash on me at home and have barely saved my downloaded archives each time? But in all the time I've had this address, Google has done an excellent job of weeding out the spam--that's practically enough to make me switch regardless of any other feature.

in-between thing: newsvine

I said I would try this for a while, and I have. I like that Newsvine doesn't make you create an account to get anything useful out of it. But I find it irritating that when I see a story I'm interested in, clicking on the link just takes me to the comments on the story, not the story itself. I have to click a second link to go to the story. Without a context, what good are the comments?

Thing 12: Do You Digg?

No.

So let me get this straight: once upon a time, librarians kept abreast of the news so that they'd know what their patrons were talking about when those patrons came in wanting to know more about what was in the headlines. And now, librarians can use Digg or Mixx or Newsvine to funnel all those news stories to them instead of taking the time to skim several newspapers and glance at CNN.

This sounds like a great idea, except that I don't see Digg and its siblings fulfilling the function that scanning newspaper headlines does. The patrons of way back when had already heard the news and wanted to know more. It looks like Digg, et al. are there to give you the news for the first time. Do libraries often get patrons in asking reference librarians what's going on? If so, wouldn't it just be simpler to point them toward the newspapers?

I understand that in a time-crunched world, people would appreciate a service that would push them just the most crucial news stories. It takes time to skim a newspaper and you can't really fast-forward through a current TV news broadcast. But I don't see that letting the masses determine what I should see is any less unbiased than leaving that judgment to editors; it's just different criteria and a different number of people that are involved.

It looks like you could get these "social news" sites customized to your preferences eventually, but they mostly seem designed for you to try to get people to validate your taste in news. I'm going to give Newsvine a try--it seems more oriented to news rather than entertainment. But I think this is going to be another Web 2.0 innovation that I can't find much use for personally and none professionally.