I am forcing myself to find the time to look at Netvibes
when really I'd rather be joining the first year students in the foyer at
WSA experimenting with every kind of printmaking...
However, I was determined to see what Netvibes could offer me.When I hit the
first hurdle within seconds (it took three attempts before I correctly
transcribed the letters in the 'are you human?' section of registering) I
was quickly frustrated. Having no previous experience of personalised
dashboards I approached Netvibes with caution. Within seconds my
dashboard was populated with an overwhelming amount of information, most of
which I wasn't interested in at all. Netvibes immediately became the enemy and
I really disliked how busy the screen looked. I longed for simplicity and
started striking off all the irrelevant information. Following this rather
violent attack, I started to rebuild.
I took a
different approach and decided to create a new dashboard for artists' books, a
particular area of interest of mine both at work and personally. I found that
if I searched for "artists' books" in inverted commas my results were
reassuringly smaller and a hundred percent more relevant. Encouraged by
this I started to add relevant widgets and links, including the Sot23things RSS feed, although frustratingly some of the widgets didn't work.
I think at this stage of Sot23things, I can be bold enough to say that this could be a useful tool, and that I intend to create several subject specific dashboards for different areas of interest and work. I intend to explore Netvibes over the coming weeks to see how useful it proves to be.
