Do you iGoogle? According to a Time Magazine article 20% of Google users now use iGoogle as their homepage. The article states:

I asked Google how much traffic the chrome tulips drove to iGoogle, but a company spokesperson declined to comment, saying only that Google had received “positive feedback” from users. She said that iGoogle currently accounts for 20 percent of visits to Google’s home page — a proportion, I bet, that Google would love to reverse. The spokesperson also declined to address any link between iGoogle and OpenSocial, noting only that “we recently launched an iGoogle sandbox to developers, which gives developers the ability to build more interactive gadgets that can incorporate OpenSocial.” Indeed, you can find more than 75,000 “gadgets” to hang on your iGoogle page these days. (Click on the tab next to Themes.)

I personally like the plain old Google page compared to the Yahooesque version of iGoogle. I know there are a lot of handy things you can do with the feature of iGoogle but when I want to search for something, which happens to be part of my profession, I don’t need the distraction that those features provide.

Google Docs is a pretty great substitute for Microsoft Word. The only time I actually use Microsoft Word is at work because it is already pre-installed on all of the library PCs. At home and everywhere else, however, I use Google Docs. And why not? I can save things in a .DOC file format if I need to send it to someone else, and I can open Word documents just as well. Sure, it might lack some of the more advanced features of Word, but who honestly ever uses those?

Anyways, there’s one cool feature that Google Docs has that I’m pretty sure I’ve never come across in any version of Microsoft Word. When you’re typing up your document in Google Docs, you can click on “Tools” on the menu bar, and then select “Word Count”. I like to check on my word counts just for the sake of knowing. But when you click on “Word Count”, you don’t just get a simple word count. Instead, you get a whole host of cool information, including: word count, character count (with spaces), character count (without spaces), the number of paragraphs, the number sentences, and the number of pages. You’re also shown some cool statistics such as the average number of sentences per paragraph, average number of words per sentence, the average number of characters per word, and the average number of words per page.

That, however, is not the coolest thing the “Word Count” feature shows. What I found the most fascinating is the Flesch Reading Ease score, the Flesch-Kinkaid Grade Level, and the Automated Readability Index.

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