Thing 19: Google Docs

Google Docs is a very nice program! I had not realized the power of it until now. It is very crisp, clear and easy to read. It doesn’t have as much clutter as Office which is nice and it might lose out on some extraneous functions that Office has, but it is free and excellent for people who just need basic functions. I imagine this will cut into Microsoft’s profits eventually when more people see how excellent it is. Saving as a PDF is certainly the best part as now you would not need special programs to create a PDF file and that is probably one of the best parts for me! The sharing aspect is neat as it can help collaborations between people. Google Docs is certainly something I will be using more of in the future and it does solve the problem of editing PDF files to a degree.

Thing 7: RSS Feeds

RSS is a fairly old system that many people never use. What is great now is that there are readers to capture these and use these to update. RSS can cover many different websites and I did choose to add Unshelved to my Google Reader for the purpose of Thing 7. Much like Thing 6, I am not sure I would want to add too many things to Google Reader since I would likely add way too many things and get overwhelmed with stories and updates I might not necessarily want to read. I realize that can speed up your Internet use, but I do like to see all that a website has to offer instead of a truncated update. The RSS feed can be great fun if it is a small content update like Unshelved or a blog post, though I still enjoy looking at the full website for now. If I feel I need to go faster, I will switch to using more feeds in Google Reader now that I know it is there.

Thing 6: Blog Readers

This is a neat little system. It is apparent that Google is trying to become a one-stop shop for just about anything. I do like how it works, however I may not use it that much since I tend to just go to the website in question instead of looking to see what was updated on Google Reader. It is a good way to track what has been updated, especially if you are short on time, though I don’t see too many librarians using this except the most technologically savvy. While I realize it may be faster to look for updates from Google Reader, I do still enjoy looking around the other sites as you can quickly get bogged down by new information on Google Reader if you have a lot of blogs to read through.