My own web1.0 to web2.0 transition?

According to gmail, my first email on that account was received in mid September 2004. What halcyon days they were! Back then you had to be invited onto gmail, it was the month before I started university and it seems my most important concern was circulating my Vogon Poem from the BBC website's Vogon Poetry Generator.

I remember setting a google homepage (which later became iGoogle??) shortly after and it seems I have not touched it since. Three of the gadgets have now expired or are "unable to retrieve". I also had a daily chess puzzle, a BBC news feed, two feeds from the New Scientist, one from the London Review of Books, my gmail inbox, as well as google translate, a currency converter, and "word of the day". Today's word is sallow.

I have kept the word of the day, the translator (sallow in Spanish is 1.sallow 2.cetrino 3.sauce 4.poner cetrino), my inbox and the LRB.

I have added the guardian, a Spanish word (s) of the day (replantar = to replant, el mechero = lighter, la cañada = gully or cattle track), and a gadget that allows me to search the RAE if I want more information on the words, which has informed me that la cañada is also a payment made by ranchers to allow them to take cattle through a ravine. I bet you didn't think you'd finish the day with that piece of information as you sipped your tea this morning.

The most interesting part for me was playing about with the organisation on the screen. I understand that "in the trade" this is sometimes referred to as "information architecture". I enjoyed rearranging the gadgets on the screen in a way that felt "intuitive". Although this "intuition" is guided by how I expect to use the information; the structure of the information we present is more important than I thought.

Now that I have brought my iGoogle account back from the dead I am forced to reflect on why I stopped using it in the first place. When I open a browser, I often do so for a reason. I found that having a homepage just got in the way of what I wanted to do and soon the novelty wore off. Plus with browsers like Firefox and Opera, that save tabs once you close them down, I could leave these pages open on my browser to have access to the information I wanted. Now with the new tab "stacks" in Opera, I have a stack of "social media" tabs, "news" tabs, and "current reading" tabs without everything looking cluttered. It's strange to think that I haven't even had a "homepage" for ages. Back in 2004 I asserted my identity on the internet with my homepage choices, now I view my identity as how other people see me. Perhaps this is what they call web 2.0.

Next task: RSS

See below for my 2004 Vogon Poem

My Vogon Poem:
See, see the Loving sky
Marvel at its big White depths.
Tell me, Thom do you
Wonder why the Vogon ignores you?
Why its foobly stare
makes you feel Urgh.
I can tell you, it is
Worried by your Vertibollog facial growth
That looks like
A Mould.
What's more, it knows
Your Ron potting shed
Smells of Really Small Evergreen.
Everything under the big Loving sky
Asks why, why do you even bother?
You only charm Meat Loafs.--