A group "sandbox" on iGoogle

Although iGoogle is not normally used for group work, it can be done. Some ECU academic staff have tried a novel way of using iGoogle as a group "sandbox". They use the sandbox to share work and try out new Web 2.0 applications. To do this you just need to set up a Gmail account and then establish an iGoogle page. For this to be effective you would need to keep the group small and ensure that no one changes the password!

Trying out iGoogle

After much prompting from my colleagues I decided to give iGoogle a go. I'm not sure I really am an iGoogle fan. You can put all you put all your RSS feeds together on your iGoogle page, but you can do that anyway on Firefox and the new IE. It is great to be able to use the fun widgets (Google calls them "gadgets"). My favourite gadget is the world webcam which flips over to a new live cityscape every 3o seconds, so you can empathise with those stuck the Tokyo traffic jams, or marvel at the city lights of Stuttgart. The only downside of the world webcams are the camera night shots of ... well nothing but the dark.

At the CAVAL workshop recently Richard Wallis was saying that he has two separate computers: one that has iGoogle on it and one that doesn't. The iGoogle gives him quite different and more relevant Google search results due to the cookies. If you use iGoogle for some time on the same machine this will happen.