Things 4, 5 and 6 - Netvibes and RSS Feeds.

Although I am pretty familiar with RSS feeds and personalised dashboards, Netvibes is entirely new to me. Or so I thought, until I tried to set up a new account and was told that an account already existed. With absolutely no recollection of ever signing up, I concluded that Netvibes couldn't have made a lasting impression on me. Returning to it now I do indeed find it pretty forgettable. After an initial panic that I wouldn't make sense of what looked like a complicated and messy page, I did manage to begin to navigate the features and have come up with a dashboard that I am quite pleased with. However I don't think I will be using Netvibes with any kind of regularity. In fact I am still very content with plain old Google reader.

My Netvibes page

After playing around with backgrounds, customising it and giving it a library theme, I then created various tabs for organising all the feeds I had added. The page above shows the libraries tab I created and here I have added feeds including the British Library, Phil Bradley's netvibes page, the Soton library page and of course the Sot23 things updates. Although it is neatly laid out and you can play around with how the information is displayed, adjusting size of text etc I still find it quite sterile and uninspiring.

In terms of collecting RSS feeds then I will continue to use Google reader and further explore a relatively new platform Feedly, which is a stylishly minimalistic news deck that syncs with reader and integrates with twitter, facebook, instapaper etc. Although I found it very straightforward to add the Sot23 Things blog page to Netvibes, I still prefer a more traditional feed aggregator, without all the fancy widgets that Netvibes encourages.

In conclusion, even if I never proceed to use netvibes, simply being aware of it as another way to collect and organise information is worthwhile. Similarly, although I have some experience of RSS feeds and use Google reader regularly, playing around with a different platform and just being aware of it's existence has made this exercise useful - even though I plan to stick to what I know and feel comfortable with. Change is hard!