#6 and #7 - RSS and Newsreaders

Have been using Bloglines for ages so thought I'd try to export my feeds to Google Reader, easy enough. I'll try it out for a bit but I am so used to Bloglines it all felt a bit weird, and I'm really not sure about the function that marks posts as read as you scroll down the page. Subscribed and unsubscribed, all works as expected. Set up Google Reader as a widget on my iGoogle page, which is pretty cute, though I do have concerns about putting all eggs in the Google basket as its omnipresence online is starting to feel a bit totalitarian - and speaking of RSS feeds, The Googlization of Everything is an interesting one to follow. As the web itself increasingly becomes the platform for applications rather than the PC, Google is already the next Microsoft and more. Thinking about platforms, it also occurred to me that there should be a good RSS feed reader in Facebook, since it transformed itself into an application environment as well as a social network, but surprisingly there's not, apart from the brave attempts of a lone high school student to create one...

But I digress. Time to wrap up, tried the EBSCO feed and seemed to work OK though I am a bit sceptical about how it will work on an ongoing basis from an authentication perspective. We shall see.

#4 and #5 - Wikis

Wikis are great for internal knowledge management stuff, especially when an intranet is difficult to publish to or locked down to a small number of content contributors. Even easier now that there are online wikis and you don't even have to have the tech smarts (and access privileges) to install MediaWiki or something similar. Will be interesting to see how publisher friendly the new SLV intranet will be and whether we'll use the portal platform, or whether the ease and flexibility of wiki publishing will see 'subterranean' knowledgebases developed outside the intranet orbit...

Re wikis as a Web 2.0 / Library 2.0 tool, less is more. Everyone wants to build their new wikis and create a community around them, there's only so much community to go around. Better perhaps to contribute to existing ones, eg contribute to Wikipedia's 'suburbs of Melbourne' category than build our own Wikitoria, ie get our resources 'in the flow' of the majority of online users rather than expecting them to come to us. The SLV marketing department have already made a few forays into editing Wikipedia entries. Not that we can guarantee that Wikipedia will still be around in 5 years of course, or that it won't have ossified into the plaything of a small number of administrators...

Hadn't tried PBWiki before but looks pretty good. Familiar with Zoho wiki, but made a couple of edits on Zoe's draft desk wiki. I can see the fun in having the desk roster in a wiki, couple of clicks and hey presto, that inconvenient evening shift has just been transferred to one of your colleagues. Mwuhahahaha...

Post in Haste

Is this on? Hardly ranks up there with the great first lines in literary history - it was the best of times, it was the worst of times - call me Ishmael - the sky above the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel (bonus points for getting the last one). Anyway, will have to do.