Pageflake!

We were sitting on the dance floor, surrounded by glo-sticks and scantily-clad ravers, when Matt had the glorious idea to make a homepage that had everything you could want at your fingertips! It was the perfect plan. We were going to be rich. Unfortunately, the folks at Pageflakes beat us to it. I was introduced to Pageflakes a few weeks ago, and have not been able to keep my fingers off it since then. (Well, except for the first few days, when I was too busy cursing the Pageflakes crew for slaughtering my dreams of wealth.) It has all my needs, from Sudoku when I need a brain tease, to a "Hot or Not" rating machine for when I need a laugh. If you can't find your perfect flake, don't sweat it, simply make one with the "anything flake." To get you started, I'm going to give you a tour of my Music pageflake. Enjoy!

When you visit my pageflake, it is broken down into several categories which I will in turn break down for you right here:

My RSS Feeds
One of the advantages of the "blogroll" feature on most blogs is that they open up so many different paths to research for material. Most of the RSS feeds on my pageflake were found through other blogs, not by searching directly. They are all connected through this network of "blogrolling." I will often see one blog from my roll quoting another blog from my roll. It's almost like a little club for music bloggers. The disadvantage of this is that the news from the blogs is often exactly the same.

This is where the beauty of blogging comes in, because each blogger takes what is often the same news and makes it his or her own. I did a blog a few weeks ago about the differing voices from the Listening Post, and how the same qualities that give each writer unique voices make otherwise repetitive posts interesting every time. Headlines like "Dead Men Do Sell Nikes" are so much more intriguing than "Converse Puts Out New Product."

Listening Post is my favorite out of all the RSS flakes because the contributors update it several times per day and they have a plethora of material from which I can pull my topics. Another favorite is Coolfer, which also updates daily and is a great source for music business news. Recording Industry vs. the People is perfect because it focuses on the interminable debate over the legality of downloading. FutureMusic and AfterDawn both focus on music-related technology, which is important because a some of the other sites are more internet-centered.

Hypebot and Inside Music Media are more personal blogs with a lot of opinion from the writers, which helps me by making sure I have different viewpoints and can see multiple sides of an issue. Music Marketing provides helpful tips to aspiring musicians and has avenues for them to post their work online. Play and NYT Music are news blogs with a broad coverage of all things music-related. Cyberextazy is kind of useless because it hasn't been updated since January, so I'm going to have to replace that.

My Active Searches
For my active searches section, I have two awesome flakes: one called Universal News Search and one called Universal Blog Search. I've filtered each search with the keywords "music," "industry" and "digital." These keywords ensure that the news and blogs that appear daily in the flakes are relevant to my subject matter. Throwing in the keyword "digital" reinforces the technology themed part of my blog: how the internet is changing the music industry.

My Zotero Bibliography
You most likely will not find this on many other pageflakes (they don't even have a biblio-flake yet). My bibliography section is a grouping of four sources (two books and two scholarly articles) that supplement my research. The books (whose annotations can also be found in the previous post) are about the future of digital music and its effect on the industry. One essay is an example of a successful music industry (in Sweden) and the other is a prediction of what will happen to the future of touring.

My Diigo Bookmarks
My Diigo Bookmarks is just one pageflake, but it's very important. When I find something online that I think might be useful, I just bookmark it to my Diigo account and continue browsing uninterrupted. The Diigo pageflake helps me to keep track of all those little tidbits that might be useful sooner or later, by using an RSS feed to constantly update my flake every time I add a new bookmark.

My Social Bookmarking Soulmate
My bookmarking soulmate is also just one pageflake, however helpful he might be. It is the equivalent of a Diigo pageflake for another person with my same interests (my soul mate). Read my previous post all about him for more information.


Now it's your turn! Have fun!