Coffee Klatch

Okay, here’s another cool Google feature. Now they’ve got a customizable home page. Kind of like My Yahoo!, only more flexible. Of course, you’ll need to set up an account, if you haven’t already, but from there it’s easy. Visit the main Google page and click on “Personalized Home.”

You can add all kinds of content and easily drag the items around on the screen to make them look the way you like. But the BEST part is called “Create a Section.” You can enter a term or a website and get all kinds of links you might like. Even better is adding the URL of any RSS feed! Not only do practically all blogs have RSS feeds, but so do news sites, weather sites, and all kinds of other sites. You can even get RSS feeds from your Google search results!

So you can make your own home page with content that you select and arrange. It’s incredibly easy to work with, and if you accidentally delete a section that you’ve made, they give you an Undo option! How thoughtful of them! When you’re all done, you’ve got a web page that has the latest information from sites that you’ve selected. All with the standard Google search box at the top.

Tomorrow I’m doing a presentation at the Indiana Library Federation (ILF)’s Reference Division Conference on Blogs and Wikis. The conference title is “How to Use Hot Technologies and Not Get Burned” and I’m honored to be co-presenting with Michael Stephens, a librarian who’s incredibly knowledgeable and excited about new technologies and how they’re impacting libraries. He’s definitely one of the library world’s new “movers and shakers.” Google’s new BlogSearch and use of RSS feeds on your personalized home page are two new reasons that libraries should have blogs, and I’ll definitely be incorporating all this into my presentation tomorrow. I found out about them just in time!

Want to find a blog on a particular topic? Used to be you had to find one of these Blog Directories and search there, wondering if the one you want ever got submitted to that directory. Kinda like how websites used to be, until gigantic search engines were developed that used spiders (bots) to crawl the web looking for sites that link to sites that link to sites….

Well, now, just like websites, we’ve got a true Search Engine for Blogs! Google BlogSearch has a simple interface, just like regular Google, and the results first list five blog sites that match your search, followed by individual blog posts that fit your query. Pretty cool!

Their blog index is continually updated and searches a wide array of languages. Their goal is to include every blog out there that offers an RSS feed of any kind. That’s how they determine the sites that are blogs, I guess. And they even offer an RSS feed for your search results! How cool is THAT?

For more information, visit the Google BlogSearch FAQ.

Current music: Earthbeat, by Paul Winter