Netvibes (Wikipedia) is a personalized homepage like Google's, to which you can add RSS feeds and various other useful things (weather, e-mail, eBay auction-tracking, etc.). One thing netvibes can do that other similar apps can't is apply the social dimension of web experience: it lets you share your personalized pages with other like-minded people. The screenshots here are from a netvibes tab I made of feeds of blogs by people who study film/media or that might be of interest to them (it's also available in a new button on my sidebar).





If you set up a netvibes account, you can add this tab and then reconfigure it as you like. This kind of remixing, personalizing, and sharing of modular content is one of the most exciting things about the contemporary web. And yet, many websites are keeping their full RSS feeds from us, making us click over to them to get the full story. Increasingly, I am interpreting this lack of full feed as a kind of arrogance or passive aggression, as though people are saying, "you come to me, I don't feel like coming to you." Increasingly I am avoiding partial-feed websites in favor of full feed ones. I would rather be able to read it the way I want. According to some authorities, blogs that switch to full feeds often get more readers. (I am too lazy to track down where I read that this afternoon, sorry.)

Here are some more newfangled web tools I have recently been playing around with (or contemplating playing around with) and a little bit of scholarly prose to put it all in context:

-Peel, an MP3 blog reader for the Mac.

-Pipes, the new masher-upper from Yahoo!

-OttoBib, an online automated bibliography generator in the citation style of your choice.

-FeedYes, to create an RSS feed for a site that doesn't have an RSS feed.

-"Remix and Remixability" by Lev Manovich.