Tour of Pageflake

Want to hear about something fantastical? Something that might possibly make your life, oh, just a little bit better? Well, before I go overboard, I want to mention that it's not a magic lamp, or money growing tree, but, it has the same skipping the hard stuff elements... Pageflakes.

Pageflakes is a free application for the internet, and allows you to make that very same internet, more about you. It takes care of your wants and your needs, before you even ask. Pageflakes is working 24/7 just to make sure you have everything you could possibly want, out of the internet that is.

Let me explain, Pageflakes is a page, full of flakes.

Ok, so, I can't explain. But I can tell you about mine...

Since beginning this whole blogging endeavor of mine, I have been deligently trying to navigate my way through this messy sphere called the world wide web. Hoping to improve my strategy to finding anything interesting, or remotely related to my blog topic, I have stumbled across things like socialbookmarking cites, rss readers, and the like. Granted, two months ago, I had never heard the term rss, or socialbookmarking for that matter, but now I am starting to understand there is a thing called metadata, a way of organizing this messy sphere. Again, two months ago, I thought I knew how to "google". That's what I would say if someone asked how internet savvy I was, "Well, I can google". Lo and behold, I was not even googling correctly! I stuck to keywords only, I never tried to think in terms of what others would say about my search topic. Well, now that I have a pageflake, I don't even need to do that anymore. I mean, for my blog topic I don't, I have my pageflake monitoring the internet for me.

My pageflake has different widgets on the same page working full time to do what they are programmed to do. I have divided my pageflake into sections. There are two columns. The left column is my RSS flakes. There are ten in total, and they alternate between tattoo related blogs and/or websites and anthropology related blogs and/or websites. The right column has four different sections. The first (on top) is my BIBLIO flakes, which is actually one flake, a webpage flake, that is connected to citeline a bibliographical webpage. The cite it's specifically connected to is my own annotated bibliography, six sources of which I have already mentioned in my Selected Readings post. The next section is my SEARCH flakes, there are two, universal news search and universal blog search. Both widgets are programmed to be searching for " tattoos and visual anthropology." Below the searching flakes is my section BOOKMARK flakes. This has only one flake, a bookmarking widget, that is hooked up to my del.icio.us account, and displays all the bookmarks that I have made on that socialbookmarking website. Lastly, the bottom section of the left column is my FUN RESOURCE flakes. So far, this too only has one flake. It is a specially designed by the University of Southern California (or Southern Carolina) Topoi widget, that is a resource to help when writing.

I hope that better helps to understanding what I mean by making the internet more about you. Right this second, my rss flakes are updating any new postings to be displayed on my page, and at the same time, any news or new blogs related to tattoos and visual anthropology are also being refreshed. So, when I look at my pageflake, I see a multitude of resources unfolding before my very eyes, all specifically working to get me the information I need to write a well informed blog on a specific topic of interest.