Thing 29: Google Tools

Ah, yes. The World According to Google, again. This things deals with various lesser-known features of Google, with the option to use other, similar tools if you're not a Google fan. I think I've blogged before about my adversion to putting all of my eggs into anyone's basket, including Google's, so I'll be looking non-Google.

News: Google News lets you personalize your news page and get sources by topic. The ProQuest databases are listed as an option, and we get ProQuest Newsstand as part of the ELM database collection. In ProQuest Newsstand you can set up table of contents alerts for new issues of a magazine or newspaper, and search alerts for new articles on a particular topic. ProQuest doesn't make it easy to figure this out, and I can't think of a publication or topic right now, so I changed my mind and moved on to EBSCO databases.

Currently I have one search alert through EBSCO (I used to have more, but I tended not to check them.) I've been meaning to get a family subscription to Newsweek for a long time (we thought we got one last year, but somebody got our money, and no subscription.) So I signed up to get an alert on Newsweek. I guess I'm just used to the odd, library way of doing things, rather than the new-millenium Google way. The search alert I have been using is for Computers in Libraries, and I do like that, and much prefer it to the system of routing paper journals (which I'm really bad at, and should get off all paper routing. Really.)

For the other part of this Thing, I have to choose between Mail, Calendar, and Web Site creation. I'm not keen on corporate America peeking into any of these parts of my life - which is the lesser evil? Sigh. I thought I already had a Google Mail account, since I've had to use Google for other things (this blog, a Google Groups activity at work last year), but no G-Mail, apparently. So I turn to Yahoo Mail, which I know I've used before. And guess what? I'm deactivated (either I turned it off, or I haven't used it for four months.) Grr. Well, poop on this mail stuff. I have two email accounts already (work and personal); I don't need more. What about Calendar?

Calendar: Yahoo Calendar lets me in (even though my email through them is deactivated.) So I've been tweaking settings and so forth. It is nice that you can make your day as long or short as you need. One of the big drawbacks of my paper calendar is that it's a traditional, 8-to-5 calendar, with little room to add details for the evening (and miniscule space for weekends.) It's interesting that you can only set appointments on the "15s" (i.e. 9:00, 9:15, 9:30, 9:45.) It would be tricky for our university setting, where we have classes starting at times like 9:40 and 1:35. I DO like the Event Type pull-down, with a LOT of possible settings (anniversary, appoinment, breakfast, interview, movie, etc. - interesting that they have Breakfast and not Brunch. Oh, well.) Much nicer in this than Outlook Calendar. I like that the display of one week seems to be customizable, you can go Friday through the following Thursday, for example. If I didn't have such major privacy concerns about this, it would be an interesting way to set up family calendards, schedule what our daughter is doing which week this summer, etc. I'm not sure this calendar can be embedded in the blog, as suggested in the Thing, but here's the URL: http://calendar.yahoo.com/marianne.hageman.

This calendar thing is worth thinking about.