Joyce Valenza has posted about iGoogle’s new personalized home page themes. Tons and tons o’ themes! And each of your pages/tabs can have a different theme. If you’re using iGoogle as a research tool for your students or as a current awareness service for your library patrons, this would be a fun way to make the pages more appealing and distinguish one page from another. I often forget which subject page I’m looking at in my iGoogle account, different header images would clue me in more quickly.
And for those of you who want to get all geeky, you can design your own google theme - this might be a fun project for a group of students. I know I’ll be playing with that later. How can I resist!
p.s. Pageflakes lets you customize the theme for each tab as well. And it’s really easy to make your own theme. Over at Netvibes, I can’t find an option to customize individual tabs, though it might be hiding there somewhere.
on Feb 14th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
Hi Polly,
I feel really nervous asking this, but why does anyone have more than one Google page? I have only one because my bookmarks, docs, and notebook stay the same no matter what new page I create. What am I doing wrong? I would love to have a page for home bookmarks and work bookmarks instead of just pulling down another menu.
Krissy
on Feb 14th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
Hi Krissy, Nothing to be nervous about!
On an iGoogle home page you can have multiple “tabs”. For different topics or interests. Or maybe for different classes? And then have lots of content coming into that page via rss feeds. So say you have a group of students doing a project on the election, you could have feeds of news, photos, database search results and so on all showing up on that page. Could be a home page on a library computer.
Pageflakes and NetVibes do the same sort of thing and they make it really easy to set up a page and then share it with others. So students could add your research page to their account and add to it. Lots of other possibilities!