Three of the best known online portal tools are:

• Netvibes
• Pageflakes
• iGoogle

You can see comprehensive notes about online portals, and Netvibes in particular, from 'Click On' by the BBC/Open University.

Firstly, they are an invaluable way to categorize and organize content of interest if you are a learner. You can place common items on the same page and categorize using understandable names. The content can come from any source that has an RSS feed, which delivers any changes straight to your particular portal page. This saves you lots (and we mean LOTS) of time and effort locating new content of interest to you. This has to be one of THE most useful tools for learners out there and it's a mystery why more aren't using them.

This has suddenly turned into a very useful research tool for your studies. Not only can you pull in relevant external reference content, you can also access all your own produced content. This means you can categorize content into separate sections for your different study areas. Then under the relevant section you can pull in all your bookmarks from your preferred social bookmarking tool, along with other content you've produced elsewhere; be that reflections or notes you've blogged, videos you've produced and hosted on YouTube (or elsewhere), your online lab notebook wiki, etc.

You can keep this content in your online portal personal, or (and this is a really good bit) you can share it with others. This means that portals can be used by educators to deliver relevant, topical content to a group of learners. Will Richardson has written about this in his Weblogg-ed blog. You can see how this can be used solely by the instructor educator or as a group resource with the ability for any of the group to add additional content feeds.

Extending this concept further, portals can easily be developed as the hub of content for a community to share resources.

I've been working for a while on the use of personal portals from a social education perspective. I played around by developing the uostech portal pages as a hub for Users of Scholarship Technology. I used this as an experimentation and research platform to 'play' around with how Web2.0 tools could be loosely harnessed for learning, teaching and research. I presented the uostech concept with a colleague at a Research 2.0 Workshop at the NCeSS Forth International Conference on e-Social Science, Manchester, UK, 18-20 June 2008. A slidecast of the presentation is available online.

By writing this post and working on uostech I realise that there is much more to be done with using online portal tools and I will develop more examples.

Cuenta con multitud de gadgets contruidos por programadores externos a google (que como en el resto de este tipo de paginas en su mayoria son inutiles) y lectores de rss. Evidentemente como se trata de google el tema de los links personalizados esta olvidado (quien necesita un listado de links preferidos cuando se cuenta con el buscador de google... ;) [sarcasmo] ).

Uno de su defectos mas evidentes es su diseño, que es tosco y desagradable (al menos eso me parece a mi). Este diseño es producto de haber querido mantener el diseño de google original, que lo cierto es que no encaja con el nivel de detalle que se precisa en una pagina de inicio, o tal vez son cosas mias (no lo se... demasiado blanco? ).

Dudo mucho que no la hallais visto alguna vez, pero si no es asi y os apetece echadla un vistazo.

url: iGoogle

Meanwhile, I'm still on the new story. My handy iGoogle page and Days Since counter tell me that I've been working on it for 22 days, though "working" is relative.

Also, I've joined the group YA for Obama. Tonight is the Biden/Palin debate and there will be live blogging from YA authors and fans. I plan on joining in.

So... who is watching the debate tonight and what are you expecting? Don't be shy. Write out loud.

Project Management and Collaboration applications are one of the staples of the typical web worker. And while we've covered our share of alternatives, the ubiquitous Basecamp is the one that I seem to run into most often.

With a healthy userbase and a robust API, it's no surprise that a number of useful add-ons have been created to make our Basecamp lives just that much easier. One such add-on I've been testing lately is Periscope by Ten Seven, Interactive.

Periscope is an iGoogle gadget that lets you quickly and easily log activity and time towards your Basecamp projects. It also provides a nice updating snapshot into the activity on your projects, even across multiple accounts. Activity is easily filtered by account or by project.

A hover lets you get a quick glimpse of the detail of each activity and a click takes you directly to the corresponding Basecamp page.

In this initial beta release you are limited to the aforementioned time tracking and logging. For now you'll still need to visit your project pages to comment or add and complete to-do items. Increased interactivity for to-dos and milestones is on the roadmap for future enhancement though. In true 37signals fashion, Periscope is updated frequently with new functionality.

Periscope is iPhone friendly for easy access on the go, and it also works like a charm on your Windows desktop as a Google Desktop Gadget.

After a successful private beta, Ivan and the Persicope team are ready to open things up a bit. If you're interested in participating head over to Periscope Gadget and register for access to the public beta which is going live a bit later today.

Today's installment of Google Gab comes a day late.

So far I have covered Google Search and iGoogle.  Today I will discuss the the tool I use as much as iGoogle and Google Search- Google Reader.  Google Reader is a great way to organize the blogs that you read.  I figured it would be much easier to show how to use it than to explain it in words.  Then I found a couple of excellent YouTube videos showcasing ways to use Google Reader and how to set it up.  So, why reivent the wheel??  Here are some excellent tutorials on all things Google Reader!

Very Basic Tutorial on How to use Google Reader

Adding Subscriptions

Viewing RSS Feeds

For more Advanced Users- Organizing your feeds

A special thanks to expertvillage for the tutorials.

You can also add you Google Reader to your iGoogle! I have mine fed there and I can keep track of all of my blogs on my iGoogle page.  To add this, go to your iGoogle Page and click on "add stuff".  Search for Google Reader and follow the  prompts.

**Please note-  My schedule has done a lot of changing.  From today on, I will post Google Gab Tuesday evenings.  Thanks to all of you who are subscribing or coming back each week!

Você sabia que pode ler tudo que tem nos seus sites prediletos sem sair da sua página inicial?

Essa é a premissa dos tão famosos RSS ou Feeds. RSS significa "Really Simple Syndication”, ou seja, uma junção que vai deixar as coisas realmente muito simples. Ele simplesmente faz com que você possa cadastrar seus sites e blogs prediletos em um só leitor, algo como o que acontece com seus emails quando se usa o Outlook. Para ler esses feeds precisamos usar os "readers" (leitores), que são fornecidos por vários sites como o Google Reader ou até alguns navegadores como o Firefox que oferecem o serviço (apesar de eu não achar muito funcional).

Legal, estava tudo junto em um só site, mas pode ficar melhor...

Então apresento o Igoogle (não, eu não trabalho no Google, mais hoje resolvi falar das ferramentas dele), essa outra ferramenta vai personalizar a sua página inicial do Google, aonde você poderá adicionar desde Youtube, Gmail, Maps e inclusive o seu Google Reader. Então agora você entra em um site só, personalizado por você aonde tem apenas as coisas que você quer ver.

Esse papo de ver apenas o que você quizer me lembra um texto exposto pelo professor Eric Messa da FAAP. O texto de Lúcia Santaella falava sobre os tipos de leitores e entre eles estava o Leitor Imersivo, que é o leito da era digital. Esse leitor vai ler apenas as coisas que ele quiser, se o clique do seu "mouse" não for ativo simplesmente ele não vai ler nada! Então agora as coisas melhoraram um pouco, pelo menos podemos escolher um pouco do que queremos ver ao invés de estarmos sendo bombardeados de informação por todos os lados sem nenhum filtro, sendo esse o leitor movente. Claro que ninguém saiu do mundo real, mais agora o mundo virtual se torna cada vez mais próximo a todos e isso simplifica as coisas.

Gostei, gostei mesmo...

Encontrei um vídeo que explica perfeitamente tudo isso que eu quis dizer...

Valew...

I'm actually quite a big fan of Yahoo – possibly because they seem to be an underdog, caught between the world domination battle of Google and Microsoft – but their fussy, over-cluttered homepage has always irritated me slightly. As web 2.0 continues it's development, and with 3.0 already arguably upon us, site design is all about simplicity, with the user's personal needs in mind. A great example large corporations realising this, and actually doing anything productive about it, is the BBC, where, to mark the beginning of 2008, they gave their retro 90's site a complete (and long overdue) makeover. Worryingly, although the BBC has great digital content, it's traditional core is hardly based online, so why is it often ahead of equally as huge, solely digital-based companies? For me, that's not really a can of worms I want to open just yet; I merely wanted to share my genuine enthusiasm that Yahoo has finally decided to embrace the concepts surrounding usability.

It seems the basic idea is that Yahoo will “choose” random users, who will provide instrumental feedback, which will then be used for redesigning the site that allegedly 300m unique people visit each month. With their last foray into design change going back to mid 2006, Yahoo seem to have finally grasped the concept that to try and rival the likes of iGoogle, they need to step up the mark. Actually, I made that last sentence up – it's what I want to believe. In reality, it seems that following the fiasco the world witnessed when Microsoft tried to unsuccessfully buy Yahoo for $44.6bn, Yahoo is going down the path of belief that by making their site and services more user-friendly, they will both capture more users and more prominently/directly be able to advertise. Therefore new site design = greater chance of increasing ad revenue. Logically, this will probably work, and although I'm happy that change is happening, I'm disappointed it's mainly for revenue purposes, rather than aesthetic reasons.

Then one day I tripped over iGoogle.  I've never been a fan of personal home pages, mostly because they were never really "personal".  In other words, you could only configure them using a predetermined number and type of widgets, usually related to the service (Yahoo, MSN, etc.) you were using.  But since Google decided to tease me with it, I gave it a try.  Now I can't live without it.

Basically, the way it works is you set up your account (free) or use your existing Google account and go to the iGoogle home page.  Log in and you are ready to start configuring.  There are literally hundreds of widgets available under the Add Stuff link for everything from time wasters to joke a days to news feeds to calendars and so on.  There are even useful widgets for teachers that have famous quotes, words of the day and so on.  Here is how I set mine up...

Since I have multiple email accounts, I found a widget for each one and set it up so that I can check them all here.  I am automatically logged in to them when I fire up iGoogle so no more password juggling.  I have a Facebook widget, a widget to manage and gain quick access to my blogs, one for Google Maps, one for Google calendar (which I use Google Sync to pull in my work calendar stuff), one for Google reader (!), gmail and the Weather Channel. 

I set iGoogle as my home page in my browser and now every time I open my browser all the important stuff is right there.  Easy!

If you recall in previous blogs, I said that the best way to get journalists to write about you is to get to know them, find out what they are interested in, what they like, read their stories, develop a relationship.

Radioscope is where a lot of media people go for their news. At least I think they do, because they haven't put anything new on the front page since July. They do have links to new stories, so maybe it is just "technical difficulties". Therein does lie a lesson. If you have date stamped information on your web site, keep it current!

On a deeper look, I suspect someone has left the organisation and perhaps only current feeds like the charts are being updated.

One thing that is really good is the Chart Feeds. You can find the latest in a range of charts including singles, albums, DVD, compilations, Top 40 Airplay, Pop, Rock, Urban, Juice, MTV, C4, Alt, pretty much every chart you want. A great feature is that you can download them as an Excel File.

You may recall in a previous blog about Hit Songs I suggested that ir you want to write a Hit Song, you need a pretty good idea of what people are listening to in your genre. This a great place to look for if you are wanting to write a hit song for the New Zealand market in one of the genres covered on New Zealand radio.

There are lots of reasons songs become hits, many that you have little control over as a songwriter. The record companies, song pluggers, DJ's, concert or tour promoters and even the media and advertisers are influential. Look at what the Cadbury's ad did for Phil Collins. When "In the Air Tonight" came out, it peaked at Number 2 in the charts, Since the Cadbury Gorilla Ad, the song has gone to Number One, years after the original song.

There are some other useful things on RadioScope. There is a large list of bands and recording artistsalong with their Label. There are also links to their web pages.

If you have an RSS Aggregator (I use iGoogle. You can access anything from their site that gets updated without actually having to keep visiting the site.

There is a weekly blog called ChartBitz by Andrew Miller which is a quick update on who's hit the charts and other relevant news.

Another excellent feature is a listing of Labels with links to their websites. They have the 4 major labels as well as 31 Indies and 2 Distribution Companies.

There are lots of places you can go once you have written your songs. If you know who a target artist that you have written a song for is signed with, this is one way of pitching it. Go to their label. One comment on that, never send them anything unsolicited because it will probably end up in File 13, aka the wastepaper basket. Ring them, tell thyem you have written a song in the style of the target artist and ask them if you can send it to them and if you do, if they will give it a listen.

I'm sure you can find more good information on this site. I like ikt much more now that I've trolled through itg. It has loads of great information. Just a shame that the home page isn't kept current.

Hey just as a footnote, I don't sit at my desk all the time. I actually wrote this blog while walking on a treadmill for 3.8km (because my PC crashed and I had to do some of it again) Exercise mind and body.

Thanks for reading this blog. If you found it interesting, why not subscribe to it. If you know someone else who might find it interesting, send them a link. I'm also keen on feedback. Disagree with me, have suggestions or want to leave a comment, please do. I'd love this blog to be more interactive.

So I'm a little obsessed with my iGoogle homepage- yes, it's geeky, I'm well aware.  I also blog- so don't be so surprised.

But really, what could be better than bringing everything you're interested in straight to you rather than going to search for it yourself out there in that world wide web? The Internet can be a big scary place to go poking around if you're not sure what you want.  And now I've made my iGoogle page even better by adding a few great yoga widgis like "Yoga Pose of the Day" and "Yoga Today" which offers free daily video classes that stream online.  Wow!

-Eliza

That is another thing I learnt how to do was take a screen shot of my computer.  I have always wondered how people do that, and I finally know how! Turns out that it is actually quite simple.

All of my classes are starting to get alot busier now.  Always something to read or some other kind of homework.  I can now see why so many people in university like coffee, and i'm sure that I will be one of those people by the end of the semester (even though I hate coffee right now). 

'til my next blog -- hope everyone takes care!

Today I am reposting about iGoogle.    Many of you are probably very familiar with iGoogle but for those of you who are not, it is a wonderful tool.  iGoogle is a customizable homepage.  It allows you to have one page with many mini-pages, gadgets, widgets, and applications feeding into it.  You can have your email, news, blog updates, weather, jokes of the day, and countless other apps delivered to one place.  Here is a copy of my page:

As you can see, I have my gmail, weather, top news stories, and RSS feeds among other applications.  I can rearrange, add or delete from these any time.  I can also change my theme to fit my mood. Once you have added several apps, you can begin tabbing.  I set mine up with categories- home, games, teaching.  I have seen some set up with Now, Soon, Never or Politics, News, Blogs.  You can have more than just three tabs, or you can just stick with the one homepage.

So, how do you sign up for iGoogle?  Simple!  Go to iGoogle. Click on “Get Started” and follow the prompts.  Once your account is set up, experiment with different themes and adding “stuff”.  Reset this page as your homepage so that you can see it each time you open your internet browser.

For those of you familiar with iGoogle, here is a tip that I just learned while at Google.  You can share tabs with other people.  You simply click on the delta on the tab you wish to share.  It will give you the option to “share this tab”.  When you click on that, a box will pop up with directions for sharing.  You simply type in the email address, choose what you want to share, and add a message.  The recipient will then be able to add your tab to their own iGoogle account.

How does this apply to the classroom?  I have heard several teachers who are using various gadgets in the classroom.  Those who teach kids under 13 (the age to have their own account) will use their teacher iGoogle to present information.  Many have election tabs that include countdown timers, quotes from the candidates, videos of speeches, campaign trail maps, and much more.  By using the tab sharing feature, teachers of older students can have a class each download the tab and it can become a classroom or virtual discussion topic.

For a couple of great tabs on the election go to Googlitics and click the links just under the picture on the home page.

Next week I will post on Google Reader.  iGoogle and Google Reader are the 2 Google tools I use more than anything!

Wesentlich schneller als seine altbekannten Konkurrenten Internet-Explorer und Firefox soll er sein, sagen die Befürworter. Aufgrund der Prozesstrennung in den Tabs würde er zudem weniger oft abstürzen. Das wären ja schon zwei Vorteile, die den Surfer bisher schnell mal zur Weißglut treiben konnten.

Skeptiker warnen vor Googles Datenpolitik oder stellen wie Blogger Robert Basic fest, dass es sich nicht lohne zu einem „dermaßen kargen Programm wie Chrome“ zu wechseln, wenn man mit den alten Browsern gut fährt.

Stichwort karg: Die Funktionalität von Chrome ist nicht zuletzt dadurch etwas eingeschränkt, dass der Google-Browser es dem User verwährt, Toolbars von oft und gerne genutzten Programmen zu installieren. Es gibt allerdings – wiederum von Google selbst – eine Alternative: Viele Info, Service- und Shoppingportale bieten ein Gadget für Google, das man sich auf die personalisierte Google Startseite iGoogle setzen kann. Auch von AdiCash gibt es ein solches Gadget. Dieses bietet alle Funktionen, die auch die Toolbar anbietet. So müssen Freunde der technischen Innovation nicht auf ihren Bargeldbonus verzichten. Und mit den hübschen iGoogle Skins kann man sich zusätzlich noch ein bisschen Farbe ins Fenster holen – momentan ist mir Chrome optisch noch etwas zu unterkühlt – aber da es open source ist, lassen Chrome-Skins bestimmt nicht lange auf sich warten…

The world is rapidly becoming digitized. People want to control their content more, whether it is the operating system they are using or the websites they are visiting, everything has to be the way they like. Colors, shapes, pictures, templates, everything today is as the consumer wants it to be. Adjustable, customized and last but not least, easy to use. Some companies decided to play into this new craving for adjustment and customization. The earliest form of customized content that was available for the masses was not online, but on an operating system. Microsoft with the launch of Windows enabled users to change colors, fonts, backgrounds and style their computer templates the way they liked. Microsoft observed the changes slowly but without going all the way. Allowing users to change just about everything has just not happened, not even today. Later on when Windows 95 was introduced along with the booming success of the Internet, websites popped up providing programs that will change the entire windows appearance with your own selected colors, sounds, photos and more. Customize.org, launched in 1998 became one of the leading websites with such services. After the discovery of customizing windows, people began thinking differently about shaping the web. With the rise of dynamic websites that were full of information, menu bars, cute .GIF files that enabled moving images, there was a new trend on its way. People became more obsessed with changing everything the way they wanted. In 1999 "My Yahoo" was launched and mainstream users poured in. Obviously, Yahoo is among the veterans when it comes to customizing the web and have never terminated the service. To this day Yahoo is one of the most visited sites around the world. In 2005, two similar services were launched to compete with Yahoo and its growing number of users worldwide. Windows launched its "Live" customized website and Google launched its "Igoogle" service for the first time. Both of the services were almost identical and did not offer much that was new. The sites today include some new features by the names of "Gadgets" or "Widgets", the name speaks for itself, they are tools used on the site to add and remove content and thus making it more on demand and easy to delete content you don't want to see on a site or add them. A gadget can be a clock on your Windows Vista sidebar, while a widget is applied in HTML coding for websites like Igoogle. Other sites like Myspace combine customizing your homepage with staying in touch with friends and family. Myspace is similar to Igoogle and My Yahoo because it offers the same features, using widgets and allowing users to customize their content. The difference is however that MySpace is also a social/dating/meeting service and far more youth oriented than Igoogle and My Yahoo interfaces with limited socializing capabilities. The conclusion is simple, people want to change everything. Interfaces, websites, even start buttons. It seems to be human nature, man has once again followed in the footsteps of fate. 

This second article was written by me. Additional sources that were used include:

http://bradgreenspan.com/?p=21, http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_personalization_push_igoogle_search.php, http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=25441, http://www.puritanboard.com/f66/igoogle-vs-my-yahoo-29013/

I have used the English article assessment paper to make sure i wrote the article correctly. I took into consideration the (1) contents (clear programme information, arousing curiosity), (2) structure (Topic sentence, logical connections) and (3) style (correct spelling, grammar and own words).

Unfortunately, Google Docs wouldn't post to my blog in Firefox for some strange reason (despite that I have always done things this way).  It's always unsettling when things suddenly stop working the way they had been working consistently.

Overall, after using Chrome for nearly two weeks I have almost no complaints.  Of course, I was spoiled in Firefox with all of the ad blocking add-ons, bookmark synchronizing and other plug-ins that will surely be a part of Chrome in the future.  From an everyday use point of view, Chrome has met all of my needs and shown me a better way to browse the web in most cases.

On the features page for Google Chrome they list ten features that have been talked about since even before the browser launched a couple days shy of two weeks ago.  Taking a shortcut in writing my official initial review of the Google Chrome browser, I am going to list each of the ten features and write about my personal experiences with that feature.

One Box for Everything

AKA, the Omnibox.  Let me just say that I love the omnibox.  I have been trying to exploit all of its functionality since I began using the browser, and I think it may still be hiding cool features from me.  It just seems to be able to do everything.  You can type anything into it and when you hit "Enter" it just goes.  Sure, nothing is perfect, and I was hoping to be able to find a story I read earlier today somewhere by searching the omnibox, but it couldn't find it (then, neither can I, searching the history, searching the web and retracing my steps, so I may just be dumb).

Of course, not much of what it does from a basic user standpoint is actually unique, it's the fact that it is all combined into one place that makes it new.  It highlights the main domain URL, but so do some plug-ins and beta browsers.  It does both URL and search box jobs, which Internet Explorer has been doing with Microsoft's own search when what you type doesn't lead to a website.  Of course, the ability to search using a site's search function before you ever load the page is a wonderful new feature.  The omnibox's connection with your browsing history is extremely useful, and the fact that it has combined so many features into one place just makes me happy.

I've always loved Google's approach to designing user interfaces, and they carried their ideas over to Chrome beautifully.  The omnibox is, of course, the very essence this philosophy.  If I didn't have my bookmark toolbar turned on all the time the whole user interface would nearly disappear into my browsing experience.  Even with the slender bookmark toolbar I feel like Chrome is a much lighter browser than most of the competition.

New Tab Page

I use iGoogle as my homepage, but the new tab page in Chrome is so comfortable and useful, it's almost like home.

It's divided into four areas.  The first, and largest section being the Most Visited sites grid.  The grid contains thumbnails and titles of your nine most visited sites.  I've never used the Opera browser, but I guess this "dialer" approach is directly knocked off from Opera (I've also seen the feature offered by add-ons for Firefox).  Below the grid there is a link to your complete web history (also a nice looking, easy to use page).

The next section at the top of the right hand column is the Searches box.  Here search boxes grabbed right from sites you've visited and searched from are displayed for you to use.  This function is separate from the omnibox's ability to allow you to search Amazon, for example by typing "amazon.com health and medicine" to search Amazon for "health and medicine."  My Searches section has a search bar for my browsing history, Amazon.com, Wikipedia.com and YouTube.com, all places I've searched from lately.  Rather than loading those sites to search there, I can use the omnibox or the search box right on my new tab page.

The next box below the Searches box is the Recent Bookmarks box.  In my new tab page it lists the last nine bookmarks I saved.  I don't know if it grabs those based on a time frame or will always list the last nine bookmarks.

Somehow, my current new tab page doesn't have the final box (it's usually there, and I'm sure there's a good reason for it to be gone).  The final box displays recently closed tabs.  I have recently closed tabs, but by "recent" I mean a couple of hours ago.  I suppose this box is populated based on a time frame.  Either way, it's the closest thing Chrome has to an "Undo Close Tab" function.

I use the new tab page frequently, though I don't see it ever replacing my iGoogle homepage unless it can learn to display custom updates (new Gmail messages, new Reader feed content, messages and updates from other sites, etc.) from the sites I use most.

Application Shortcuts

Admittedly, I hadn't used this function until just a few seconds ago, but it's great!  I went to my site's dashboard at WordPress and clicked on the "create application shortcuts..." menu item.  A box popped up showing me a preview of the icon and text for the shortcut, and below there were three check boxes for creating the shortcut on my desktop (checked by default), in my start menu and in the quick launch bar.  I left the default checkbox checked and hit OK.  Immediately, the WordPress tab jumped out of my main browser window and the whole Chrome interface disappeared.  At that point, the WordPress interface takes over and it behaves just like an application on my computer.

Just to try it out, I closed the WordPress window and opened the new shortcut.  I loaded quickly (Google Gears may have been playing a part in that) and worked beautifully.  I had originally worried that the shortcut might be an average Internet shortcut that opens in your default browser (still Firefox on my computer), but these shortcuts load in special, featureless windows designed to make the page feel like its own application.

Perfect.  I love this feature and will begin creating application shortcuts for all of my favorite web applications (and some I wasn't using just because they weren't accessible enough).

Dynamic Tabs

Dynamic is a good word for it.  Even just watching them move around so fluidly as I rearrange them, open new ones and close old ones, I love the way these tabs work.  Even better is the ability dock and undock tabs from different windows.  If I have three tabs open and I want to make sure one doesn't get closed by accident while I am closing others, I can drag that tab down out of the tab bar and it separates into its own new window.  When I have the first window back in order, I can drag that separated tab back into the main window and I'm back to having only one browser window.  It's fluid, it's dynamic, it's fast and it's efficient.  I think it's great.

Crash Control

Aah, what a relief.  Google Chrome runs each tab in a separate process on your computer so if something crashes one tab the rest of them can continue functioning.  In theory this should bog the system down a bit, but I haven't noticed a drop in performance at all (and my system is OLD - 512 MB of ram, single core processor, and so forth).

Built in with these separate processes is a process manager.  I can't figure out how to bring it up manually, but it comes up automatically if a tab is taking too long and gives you the option to shut it down.  I've heard the process manager can be viewed by bringing it up manually, but I haven't cared to poke around enough to find it.

So far, after twelve days of continuous, daily use, I have yet to see any fatal errors, major problems or crashed programs.  The task manager has come up offering to let me wait on or close slow tabs only three or four times, and most the time I just choose to wait and the tab loads eventually (dumb slow ISP...).

Incognito Mode

True, this has been dubbed "porn mode" by many ever since the feature was made part of the new Internet Explorer and similar functions appeared through the use of plug-ins and third party applications.  Basically, this is a new browser window you can open that prevents any information from being stored on your computer (cookies, history, cache, browsing information of any kind, and more).

I don't have much use for it as a "porn mode" but I did run some tests on it to see if it could indeed mask my web browsing activity as promised.  No sign of my incognito activity was recorded to the computer, just like they said.

Unless I'm trying to hide something from someone else who uses the computer, I really can't see much of a use for incognito browsing (for me, personally).  I understand there are people who would want it for one reason or another, but it's not really that exciting to me.

Perhaps the best part about this mode is the window that loads when you first open the incognito browser window.    

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="320" caption="Click for larger view."][/caption]

I love that last bullet point of things to be wary of - people standing behind you.  Especially with the nickname such a mode has earned, the idea of someone thinking they are safe looking at some dirty videos or images and someone else standing right behind them watching really tickles me.

Safe Browsing

Chrome is connected with Google's directory of harmful sites and integrates this service into the browsing experience.  While my normal web browsing habits never take me to the darker corners of the net, I can see how such a service could be quite handy.

When you are about to view sensitive data over an insecure connection the browser warns you.  Also, as with any non-Internet Explorer browser, browser specific attacks are rare.  The separate processes for each tab also provide a certain degree of safety.  For a number of reasons, Google is entitled to claim that Chrome offers safe browsing.

Of course, security holes exist and a patch has already been issued in the form of an upgrade (an easy process once you know where to go - the About Google Chrome menu option).  No browser (to date) can claim to be 100% secure, but Chrome makes major strides in the right direction.

Instant Bookmarks

Bookmarking a page really is easy, especially since Google borrowed most of the process from already established models.  The star icon that I first saw in Firefox (though since I avoid Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera and Netscape I suppose it could have started in one of those) has reappeared in Chrome, and it has been improved upon.

While at a page you wish to bookmark, you click the star icon and a tiny menu box opens right there with options for renaming the bookmark and placing it in a folder.  There is an Edit button for more options, a Close button for if you don't need to edit anything and there is a remove button to remove the bookmark (the same menu pops up every time you hit the star, even if the page is already bookmarked).  That's it.  Simple, sweet and easy to use.

Importing Settings

When I installed Chrome it identified Firefox as my current default browser and offered to import my settings and data from Firefox.  I did, and it brought all of my bookmarks and cookies over, but I don't think it brought my browsing history, which would have been nice.

Simpler Downloads

I really do like the download manager in Chrome.  There isn't much to say about it though, because it's just too simple and elegant to criticize or discuss.  It downloads things at the bottom of the window, the tab that initiated the download gets a little green down-arrow to signify that a download is being managed from there, the corner display has a percentage and bits downloaded progress circle, and the finished download display has a menu for interacting with the downloaded file.  That's it.

The browser keeps a history of your downloads, which can be viewed like the browsing history.  A default download location can be set, and an option to "ask every time" can be enabled.

General Review

Again, this browser isn't ready to replace my beloved Firefox browser as the default browser.  However, after twelve days of using it as my default browser, I have to say I'm only waiting for a few things to come together.

For one, if this post formats correctly after the transfer from Google Docs to WordPress, about 90% of my reason for leaving Firefox as the default browser will have disappeared.

If I have to go back and erase a bunch of DIV tags to get it to format correctly, I'm going to be quite annoyed and Chrome will have to start mowing my lawn before I'll make it my default browser.

So I suppose we could consider the posting of this article the moment of truth between Chrome and me.  Of course, the formatting issue isn't the only problem I've had with using Google Docs in Chrome.

Here is a summary of the problems I have encountered so far in Google Docs using Chrome:

1. It uses DIV tags to separate paragraphs in the HTML.  This does not happen in Firefox.  (See screenshot below.)  The DIV tag creats an issue in WordPress, and makes the whole thing format incorrectly.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="320" caption="Click for larger view."][/caption]

2. The main Google Docs interface page is having troubles rendering correctly in Chrome (see screenshot below).  As of right now, the problem seems to be coming from a failed attempt to update the Google Docs application.  Right now I've got a red exclamation point where the little green circle should be.  That's not good.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="320" caption="Click for larger view."][/caption]

It never got past the 67% and now it says: "An error occurred while updating software. Failed to update software for the applications: Google Documents, Google Spreadsheets."  If this isn't Chrome's fault, I don't know who to blame.

3. When assigning text as a link, a space is often inserted after my selected text.  If my memory serves correctly, this may have been happening on occasion in Firefox as well.  May not be browser specific, but it can be annoying.

4. I don't know whether to blame Chrome for this one, but Google Docs mysteriously quit posting to my blog from Firefox after I posted to my blog from Chrome just once.  Coincidence?  Maybe.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it is obvious that Chrome is having compatibility issues with certain web applications (eh hem, Google Docs; though others are probably out there) and that is to be expected.  For now, I forgive Google but I expect them to fix it, especially since my problems have to do with Google products.

To be completely fair, web standards play a huge role in this issue, and Microsoft's near monopoly on the browser marked makes things difficult for smaller browsers (even Firefox).

Except for compatibility and web standard issues, I really don't have many complaints about Chrome.  Google stripped the traditional browser of many features it felt were redundant, unnecessary or overly complicated and produced Chrome with all the features it needed wrapped up into a neat, efficient package.  I love the way it handles.  It feels like navigating the web in a technology demonstrator prototype vehicle.  Some things are a hundred times more efficient (Chrome does feel a little faster) and in other areas you're bound to happen upon a bug or two.  I look forward to future releases and upgrades, and may soon make Chrome my default browser (especially if this post works out and I don't have to redo the formatting).

*Update: The formatting issue remains an issue.  I suppose I'll have to report this to the folks at Google. 

OKAY, GOOD NEWS! I finally figured it out! Here is my screen shot! Thanks for everyone's help!

 So I'm doing my weekly visit to one of my favorite blogs http://nonsociety.comand I was about to scream when I saw Mary  (one of the lovely bloggers on NonSociety) in front of iGoogle. iGoogle has become one of my new infatuations lately and to see this pic made my heart do a triple beat (just wanted to do a little rhyming for you) Thanks Mary for taking this pic made me happy!

so I emailed Mary and asked her about the iGoogle store here is the email posted below :( i'm sad.  They should put iGoogle in every airport :)

Hi Mary,
First off I just love visiting the site perfecto! Second I'm looking
at a picture you took in front of an iGoogle store just wondering
where is that store! I am somewhat infatuated with iGoogle only God
knows why but I serously would love to know where this store is.

Thanks a mil!

NikaMarie

 Reply Forward
Mary Rambin to me
show details 4:23 PM (39 minutes ago) Reply
Hi NikaMarie,

It was just a booth in the Bryant Park tent and is gone now.  They were just
showing people how to put a skin on their Google.

Glad you enjoy the site.

Best
Mary

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