IM

The only trouble I have with IM is that my brain works faster than my fingers!! Of course the only other limitation is that you both have to be online at the same time.

Google Docs

We had set up a Google doc between us and another library to work on a project, which seemed great at the time, but due to circumstances found that we were the only ones working on the document and therefore ceased using Google Docs. In theory it worked well - practice needs a little working on. Usually when working on a document it is inhouse and we use our Council's content mangement system to store them. So at the moment we do not seen a need for this.
Could not open the file of 100 great hints.

iGoogle and other tools

Had an explore around iGoogle and liked it. There now seems to be the realisation that we use a lot of different tools and need one place to park them all.
Ping looks interesting although I did not go into and play, being able to update multiple networking sites at once is a great idea. Libraries are now subscribing to mutiple tools need to use staff time efficiently and this application would definitely be worth investigating.

RSS revisitied

 I use Bloglines for both at work and home and have found it very useful. I visit the site regularly and have being able to keep up-to-date with issues easily. I feel that this has been one of the most useful things I learnt from the first round of training. I do not feel that I need to filter out my feeds as I am managing with the number of feeds. At work I have 13 feeds and I am following about 7 at home.

Slideshows, screencasting and digital storytelling

I have viewed many slideshare presentations and have mixed opinion on their usefulness, it all depends if the slides have been written in a way to be understanable without the presentation. The slides may not contain any useful information. On the other hand it is a great way of sharing what has been presented as it is in that file type and does not have to be reformatted.
At first I thought screencasting was a great idea, but then I thought if you need to explain how to use a website or function initially that perhjaps it is not user friendly to begin with!! I see screen casting would be great for users who want to delve deeper into the functions of a website.
Digital storytelling - getting people to tell their stories - an important part of engaging people. I can definitely see a use for this and we have been throwing some ideas around  about how to do this and what subjects to cover, so I will add this as an option to my list.

Nings

There is certainly a lot of information packed into the pages. I have come across a Ning in my "other" life as a crazed scrapbooker and liked the format. It was not as busy as the ones listed in this blog post. But they certainly able to link up a lot of tools into a place that looks so much like a website that everyone is familar with - an option worth exploring particularly for a staff info page.

Evaluation

Evaluation is a great idea and one that I admit not doing enough of. I have found the hardest thing with the evaluation tools is to understand what each term refers to and then which of these items evaluates usage the best.
I have jooined up to Google alerts so it will be interesting to see what results come in. Hopefully I will be pleasantly surprised - but I have the feeling I will not get much results. Will keep you posted.