I don’t know about you, but I lost my short term memory a long time ago. According to HelpGuide.org “Memory, like muscular strength, is a “use it or lose it” proposition. The more you work out your brain, the better you’ll be able to process and remember information.” So if the best way to improve short term memory is to test it, than I have the iGoogle Gadget for you.

What better way to practice your short term memory, than with the ultra simple children’s matching game on your iGoogle page. So leave it to LabPixies to provide the fine Memory Game gadget. Everyone has played some version of this game. You flip some cards with pictures on one side. Than you try to use your memory to match each picture with its twin. It sounds a lot easier than it is though. I have tried it and my best score is an embarrassing 25 steps.

Of course like most of LabPixie’s gadgets the Memory Game is well implemented. There are several themes to pick from to help add that extra bit of customization to your iGoogle page. Overall it is pretty hard to mess up such a basic game and not only did Memory Game not mess up it is pretty darn fun to play.

I believe that one of the most under appreciated technologies available are web cam feeds. No I am not talking about two people sitting at a computer talking to each other. Instead, I mean the feeds that give you a live look at places around the world. Now we can even view these feeds all through the iGoogle page, thanks to My Webcam(Auto Refresh).

Now let me get the most blatantly obvious downside of My Webcam(Auto Refresh) right out of the way. It does indeed slow down your iGoogle page significantly. You will notice that your iGoogle page is constantly loading the new images. While you can edit the time between refresh, I remedied this by creating a tab dedicated to these live web cams feeds. It is really quite a marvel to be looking at a live feed of Paris in one eye and the New York Skyline in another. In fact that tab has turned into my eye into the world. I would highly suggest it.

It is fairly simple to get the My Webcam(Auto Refresh) gadget set to your favorite feed. Just go to the gadget settings and insert the URL of the Webcam feed. This is easily obtainable if you are using Firefox. To get the URL just right click and select copy image location.

So if you can get past the inherit slowdown of your iGoogle page, I highly suggest looking at the worldly views available through the My Webcam(Auto Refresh) gadget.

As I write this article it is a blizzard outside. There is not a single sign of life visible. Needless to say this can lead to that winter dreary that most everyone experiences. So like all mental illnesses, I resort to my iGoogle page for a cure. Once again Google gadgets pulls through and give me Flowers of the Day.

Let me just say that I love flowers. I am not the least bit shamed of admitting it. So when I came across the Flowers of the Day gadget I was fairly excited. It delivered with its name. I definitely got pictures of flowers. The gadget features a slide show of pictures of flowers. There appears to be a large supply of photos, because I have yet to see a repeat. My only complaint with the pictures is that they tend to be a little to artistic for my tastes. I just prefer simple pictures flowers.

As far as Gadget implementation goes, Flowers of the Day falls short. About half of the gadget consists of the actual sideshow itself. The rest is ads and empty space. I know to a lot of iGoogle masters this may seem like a sin, but to a casual iGoogle page user this may be an alright trade off. For me this gadget gave me just enough of that good weather feeling to get me through the snowstorm.

If you don’t know about RSS feeds, check out this video first. And while there are many different feed readers, I’ve found Google Reader to be the best. Explaining Google Reader is beyond the scope of this post, but check out Google’s own introduction of it here.

I’ve needed an easier way to access Google Reader, and now I can, from within iGoogle as a gadget. And since its made by Google, it has abilities that most gadgets do not. One is that it can display things beyond the borders of its iframe. You’ll notice this in the popup bubbles when displaying a post.

You can display up to 10 posts at a time and sort by oldest or newest. You can view by Tag or Folder. And it also has two different views in the Canvas Page: Expanded and List. Remarkably, the Reader keyboard shortcuts that I love work in the Canvas view.

Everyone should be taking advantage of RSS feeds these days. Try this gadget.

Now let me start off by saying that I have a completely reasonable fear of penguins. I believe that they are the true masterminds behind the Cold War. Also who can trust a bird that looks like it is wearing a tuxedo. So I was weary when I came across the gadget named Poke the Penguin. This turned out to be about the simplest form of entertainment you can find. I guess Poke the Penguin can best be categorized as a game. It basically comes down to you rapidly clicking on an innocent looking penguin. But when you poke the penguin enough, it retaliates in a hysterical way. See now I have you hooked. Instead of telling you what the penguins does, I think it is best if it is left a surprise.

I may still have an irrational fear of penguins, but Poke the Penguin manages to keep me entertained.

Merry Christmas!!!!!!

Who doesn’t love waking up in the morning and being greeted by a Google Logo for the special occasion? Have you ever enjoyed one of the special Google logos so much that you wish it could be on your iGoogle page everyday? Well now it can thanks to the Customize the Google Logo gadget.

This gadget features over 40 different logos to choose from. Every special occasion is featured from Halloween to Alfred Hitchcock’s birthday. Also my personal favorite logo that I will treasure forever thanks to this gadget is the 1999 Google Beta icon. You can change these icons simply by clicking on the settings for the gadget and you will be featured with a nice scroll down list of all the logos. While this may seem inconvenient to not have some sort of visual representation of the logos you are choosing, ultimately it serves to the users advantage by saving precious iGoogle real estate.

There are a few downsides to this gadget though. The logos are somewhat low resolution and cause it to be a little choppy. Also the logos are limited to the ones that were featured pre-2005. As far as I am concerned this is a small price to pay to get your iGoogle page even more customizable.

No I am not talking about the most recent fashions trends. Instead I am referring to the much more interesting Google trends. What better way to keep up with what people are Googling than with the Google Hot Trends gadget on your iGoogle page.

I find news feeds a little untrustworthy sometimes. I don’t want some editor deciding what news I should be paying attention to. So instead I largely look at the Google Hot Trends gadget to see what is going on in the world. This has proven consistently to be a valuable source of information. From what I can tell people seem to search for info on things faster than the news can cover it. So if any real news happens the trends will tell me to search for it.

The Google Hot Trends gadget uses perhaps the most easily understandable rating system available: Hotness. Depending on how much the popularity of a search has increase it is put on a rating scale of “mild” to Volcanic. However this is completely dependent on the spike in traffic. The number one search can be mild at one point and volcanic at another.

To be honest, not all the top searches are completely legit. Sometimes on a slow news day weird things will happen. Every once in a while meaningless things will appear as a top search like “Meg Griffin” or the occasional dirty video reference. Perhaps on the funniest of occasions a large group of people will work together to game the system and get a funny message to appear as a “hot” search. However. it is all good fun and just adds to the usefullness of the gadget.

I have to say that today I desperately wanted to see the Jets game. Well unfortunately I am stuck in Buffalo Bills coverage. Seriously all I ever get to watch is the Bills. So I went to the Internet to get my NFL updates. However, it just wasn’t efficient keep the nfl.com news up the entire time. So I went to The Official NFL Widget for help.

Now on a scale of 1-10 visual attractiveness, The Official NFL Widget scores a 10. It looks awesome. I may even keep it up past NFL season just for its looks. It is also highly functional. The Official NFL Widget has all the news that I could want. In a tabbed menu format there is the choice between Home, Games, Standings, and my beloved Fantasy sections. So in one sweet package your getting all your news, scores, and standings with a little bit of Fantasy Football advice to top it off.

So thanks to The Official NFL Widget I will no longer be forced to watch the Buffalo Bills play in hopes of catching some Game Breaks. Instead I will continue on with all my daily activities while being able to check back on my iGoogle page for scores.

In 1955, a Colorado Springs-based Sears store ran an advertisement encouraging children to call Santa Claus on a special telephone hotline. Due to a printing error, the phone number that was printed was the hotline for the Director of Operations at the Continental Air Defense (CONAD). Colonel Harry Shoup took the first Santa call on Christmas Eve of 1955 from a six-year old boy who began reciting his Christmas list. Shoup didn’t find the call funny, but after asking the mother of the second caller what was happening, then realizing the mistake that occurred, he instructed his staff to give Santa’s position to any child who called in. Three years later, the governments of the United States and Canada combined their national domestic air defenses into the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), but the tradition continued. (Thanks for that Wikipedia

Since then, NORAD has modernized, and now instead of just calling in to find Santa’s location, you can track him live on iGoogle! This gadget uses the Google maps API to display Santa’s position in realtime. In the meantime, you can see a Santa’s smiling face counting down to the big day. With all these tools available, it’s great to see that the North Pole is still relying on good old fashioned blue-collar labor to get the presents delivered, and hasn’t outsourced delivery to a predator drone or something (jk). Merry Christmas iGoogle!!

Most everyone with any internet know-how has heard of Twitter. It is a service that allows you to post updates about yourself and read updates of others. Some would even say that Twitter is an obsession. So it is no surprise why the brand new TwitterGadget is so popular. In fact it is so popular that they had to shut down the service, because there was more demand than they could handle. No worries, though, because they have made upgrades and assure us that there will be no more interruptions.

The TwitterGadget provides all the necessary features for Twitter. You can easily add updates by typing the message into the text box. Than to submit you have to click on the image at the bottom right of the text box, though I still can’t figure out what that image is supposed to be.  Below the text box there is a simple tabbed menu that allows you to see your replies, favorites, and all messages that are publicly available.

One of my biggest (and only) complaints  is that as far as I can tell there is no way to change the background of the gadget. This wouldn’t normally be an issue, but that shade of blue is as ugly as it gets in my opinion.

Also it should be noted that Gmail has opened up the option for adding gadgets to your Gmail page. TwitterGadget is just about as convenient as it gets to have right at your fingertips while writing emails.