Getting into bed with Google?

It's curious to think that just about a year ago I was starting to prepare my contribution to a debate on 'Is Google making us stupid?' with an improbably distinguished panel of speakers for the Alumni weekend at Wolfson last September. The upshot of the afternoon was that I projected a rather more downbeat view than I'd really intended, and didn't show the librarians' view in the best light. However, the regrets of hindsight aside, I retained (and do still harbour) some real reservations about Google as the single most powerful information hoarder and provider I know. Tags for my concerns might include 'commercial_power', 'privacy', etc., none of which are original, but they are no less troubling for that (perhaps more so, indeed, since the more articulate and knowledgeable detractors are able to articulate with concrete evidence just how powerful and all-pervasive such firms are, e.g. Bill Thompson and others on Google Books settlement).

But Google offers much that is useful. I'm bound to admit that I search Google multiple times a day, and since re-establishing an iGoogle page for Cam23, I've enjoyed exploring more of what's available. I first set up a Google account to view statistics on the College website delivered through Google Analytics (again, not set up by me, but I was particularly keen to see how the college library webpages were fairing, though, alas, found the detail to be a bit too broad to be useful in the event), and had dabbled a bit with Google Reader. But it wasn't a page I visited regularly, thus defeating its purpose as an RSS repository. 'Thing 1' helped me set up the page more systematically, and with a few additions over recent weeks as I've tried to make it useful in more contexts, here is the result:

[Now, as promised in my last post I started writing this as a blog post in Word. At this point I saved the post as a draft and viewed it in Blogger direct. The text transferred fine, but not the screenshot, so I switched back to Blogger to add it, as instructed. I used Paint.net as the image editor, which is the free application I use in College for all picture editing. Next on my 'to do' list is to spend time looking at the other options Andy recommends. Meanwhile, I'm still bothered by this Picasa business - same thing as happened when I loaded the Library entrance photo: has my image now been stored in Picasa...? No.2 on my 'to do' list - find out!]