My Pageflakes pagecast

I was recently introduced to a website call Pageflakes. Pageflakes is free and easy to sign up for and it is a very useful way to connect to all of your favorite sites and feeds in one place, as well as add some more interesting and fun tools and widgets. Another cool thing about Pageflakes is that it allows you to publicize your page as a pagecast. This turns out to be a great way of not only condensing and refreshing alot of information and sources on a particular subject area but also sharing your information with others as well as using other's pagecasts, some of which are pretty well built. I'm going to run you through on a little tour of my pagecast and describe some of the additional features and functions on it as well as dicuss the content and resources I have included on it. I should mention you can design as many pages as you want and you can keep them private if you want to. You can check out my public pagecast here.

Let's begin with the organization and content of my page. I have organized my page into two columns, on the right side with a main title of RSS Feeds I have included about 10 feeds from various blogs including my own an other's that I am currently reading and interested in. The blogs all have a subtitle in blue that will tell you what it is. Most of the blogs are about Iran, current events, and foreign policy but, there are a few that are on other topics such as Iranian life, arts, and culture, there is an anti-war blog and I even included the blog of President Ahmadinejad for anyone interested in reading what he has to say (since I have come to know his personality and history quite well, I find it to be quite entertaining). The feeds to these blogs will be updated everytime you access the page so with all the blogs there is always something new to read and learn about. On the left hand side of the page I have included the tags from Diigo. I have included my Iran tags as well as my social bookmarking soulmate tags related to Iran, so anytime my dear SBS bookmarks something new about Iran it will show up on my pagecast. Also on the left is two widgets I added that contain two searches, one is for a universal search for Iran blogs, and another is a universal search for Iran news. These widgets are a great way to constantly find new content. The last thing I have included on the left is my Zotero bibliography courtesy of Citeline. My bibliography includes books and articles about Iran both governmental and academic. For those of you who aren't familiar with Zotero or Citeline I suggest you check them both out if you are on the web alot.

This is a work in progress and there are still alot of features and tools I haven't even begun to delve into yet, but so far this as been an awesome way to consolidate sources on the web. You can design your page with a variety of borders and graphics. You can also link your email or Facebook to your page so you can turn your page into a one-stop web experience with all your favorite content at your finger tips. One thing that is interesting about all of my feeds on Iran and current events is that by looking at the brief feed descriptions it sort of gives you a shotgun blast of information that instantly tells you what is going on. As I scan my pagecast now I see that Rafsanjani is in Iraq, Azar Nafisi has a new book out, the Right wing is not united around Ahmadinejad, and there is an oil spill in the Karkheh River in Iran. In summary, Pageflakes is a great content aggregator and fun too.