That's how I'd try, in my corny way, to promote Pageflakes. It's a start page similar to iGoogle or Netvibes. The idea is that you can put a whole bunch of things (ie, widgets/flakes) that you like all together on a page, or a tab. You could have a very basic "home" start page, with your email, a game that you always play, the weather, a calendar, and some RSS feeds. You can also have more specialized tabs--ones devoted to music, sports, science, etc. Then if you really want to, you can also publish this particular tab into a "pagecast" and other people can see it and use it too. It's a great way to share information, and so--I've made one!
Make your way on over, or just read my little summary of it here:
I've tried to keep it organized. On the right are RSS feeds to blogs I like to keep up with. Many are included in my blogroll. I'll need to update my blogroll. One of them is this blog you are now currently reading. (On a side note, a cool thing aboutPageflakes is that you can click a button and view a pagecast as if it were an RSS reader.)
To the left, under the introduction are two search engines (already loaded with search words) to keep us updated on current, related pieces of news and blog entries. And remember Maigemu? I've bookmarked his "mission" tags. I've also shamelessly bookmarked my own Diigo bookmarks.
And here's something juicy--the annotated bibliography I've been giving sneak peeks to! It's done really techno-savvily with Zotero, a source-bookmarking add-on to Firefox, and Citeline, an online tool that automatically types up bibliographies for you, made by those geniuses at MIT. It's okay if this isn't your favorite part of the pagecast, though. I understand if it's a bit dry.
Next, some websites for getting involved... All three of these websites are sites of organizations founded by a man named Cameron Townsend. The first is Wycliffe Bible Translators, an organization I've mentioned before. They are a mission organization aiming to send people out to translate Bibles. Besides actual Bible translators, included in the work force (partially through the closely related Wycliffe Associates) are language surveyors, literacy specialists, teachers for the kids of missionaries, even librarians, and many many more.
They work very closely with JAARS, of whose site I've included as third in the pagecast. JAARS is an organization aiming to aid missionaries in other, more specialized and technical ways (eg, radio transmission, aviation, information technology, contsuction).
The second website included (yes, I understand I'm explaining out of order) is OneStory. OneStory aims to make voice recordings of Bible stories for oral-based cultures. It's a great step toward actual Bible translation.
And the last little bit of this pagecast, tacked onto the right column under the RSS feeds are two websites full of great linguistic information--SIL International and its publication, the Ethnologue, a collection of the world's languages.
And.. that concludes my pagecast! I hope you have fun using the pagecast and looking at all the things I like to look at!
--kowai-kawaii
edit: I've updated and changed the pageflake a little bit, so it currently is a bit different than what I've written about here... And I'm sure it will continue to change, too, so just go there and check it out! :)
