I ran into a frus­trat­ing issue at work last week. To try to help solve it, I cre­ated the ALA Uni­verse in order to help staff track some of what’s going on inter­nally. I had just received an invite to the beta of Netvibes Gin­ger, the new ver­sion that lets you cre­ate a pub­lic page any­one can view, so I decided to test it by cre­at­ing this resource. I sent an email about it to all staff and encour­aged them to sign up for their own accounts if they want to also track their unit’s blogs, wikis, etc. Then they could add the feed for new doc­u­ments added to our inter­nal knowl­edge man­age­ment sys­tem. We’ll see if any­one finds it use­ful, but I’ve already got­ten a few com­ments from staff who think it will be valu­able to them.

I could have used Super­Glu instead, the way I did two years ago for the La Grange Park Pub­lic Library proof-of-concept, but I wanted a scannable view, rather than a river of news. Michael Stephens has posted about Netvibes sev­eral times with other exam­ples that might give you ideas for how you could use the site. Gin­ger should go live for every­one in a cou­ple of weeks.