I am going to be seen as a Negative Ned. Two blogs in a row about the consarned technology and how I hate it so! But I don't hate blogs or blogging! I love those! I did say in Method # 1 that I worry that blogs don't get read often and may be a waning communication method, but I still believe in blogs as a concept. However, I am not a huge fan of the current spate of customizable windows.
Of the two we reviewed I would choose neither for my library. I find them far and away too busy for my personal design tastes and the needs of my library community. My community has a good amount of people on the far side of the digital divide. We are trying our hardest to bridge that gap and these current tools with their myriad of windows and tabs would alienate most of our base. Now that's not to say that our website has no links and is without complexity, but a frontpage that is totally filled with different boxes (several of which have streaming text) is totally at odds with our design needs.
As an information consumer myself, i was livid with igoogle being defaulted in Firefox and quickly reverted to classic. I don't like everything in one single place on one screen for my search engine needs. That's why I shy away from yahoo in the first place. Also, I don't need the constant reminder of how intrusive Google is into my personal life with their updating content based on my searches and purchases.
So for this method I'd say that if I were to use one of these tools I'd have to strip them very pared down for my personal tastes and also for my library's tastes*.
*I should point out that we field test all our tech changes with multiple patrons of different ages and tech skills before we implement major changes, so this isn't just my bias that would make this decision.
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