When
piecing together my online dashboard, I quickly discovered some undeniable
truths in the way I use the internet. I decided to create my dashboard using
the very popular netvibes website and application. In order to fill your
dashboard, the site directs you to either select from a group of feeds the site
labels as essentials or search for other
feeds or apps you would like to add. Smack dab at the beginning of the essentials list is Facebook. Of course,
this was the first app I added to my dashboard. Reddit and YouTube, my other
main uses of the internet, soon followed. I decided to group these three feeds
onto a single tab and labelled it Social.
I think that by grouping these three site feeds and applications together on a
tab, I will be able to achieve a couple of my infotention objectives. First and
foremost, I will be able to consciously ignore that tab! I always find myself aimlessly
wandering through these three websites with no filter or stopper for my
addiction. Now I have a tab purposely separated from my other browsing uses.
Additionally, by confining these three applications, I am hoping to diminish my
addiction. Applications are not quite as enjoyable to use as a fully functional
website.
The
second tab I created is dedicated to the four main news sources I enjoy
visiting. I gather the vast majority of my news through online outlets. I
purposely placed USA Today news and Wired News next to each other in my
dashboard. This act is aimed at allowing me to increased enjoyment in my news
browsing practices. I often find great news articles on the mainstream news
sites pertaining to the digital industries that I am interested in, but I
quickly get distracted by the other stories and articles on their webpages. By
placing Wired on my dashboard, I can immediately move from USA Today to a more technology-focused
news source and follow-up on my interests. This will definitely help my
infotention efforts.
My
tertiary use of the internet is for accessing up-to-date information on all of
my favorite sports teams and competitions. Therefore, I dedicated an entire tab
in my online dashboard to sports news. Leading the charge on this tab is my
most visited sports site: ESPN.com. I also included a feed for NCAA basketball,
the Philadelphia Eagles of the NFL, as well as a feed for world soccer news.
Traditionally, I visit ESPN.com for general updates on my favorite teams (all
included in the previously listed feeds) then travel to more specific news
sites for a deeper insight into sporting news. By surrounding my ESPN feed with
more focused feeds pertaining to my major interests, I should be able to
minimize my distractions, dive straight into the news I want to read, and
hopefully the time I spend wastefully traversing the internet will diminish.
As
a side not, Netvibes added a google search tab to my dashboard by default. I
really like it! I have been using my dashboard for about an hour so far. The
search tab has allowed me to immediately follow-up on news stories that do not
fall into one of my traditional categories of interest. Without the dashboard
and the accessibly search tab, I probably would not have retained enough
interest (or just been too lazy) to further research these opportunities for
increased knowledge!
The
screenshots of my dashboard’s tabs are provided below:
Jealous! How did you get that A on the top screen? Glad you are taking advantage of the news, tech, social and sports news you follow. Better to follow ESPN, but you can also get access to the website of the team you like, too. Really great. I'm hoping I can reduce the number of windows open on my browser. You too?
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