I, Myself and Mine
LG
“Personalization” is unique to human interaction. As a human species, we have always been drawn to concepts and ideas that show us who we really are. And in this age of information, is it little wonder that we seek a personal touch, a “me” feeling in the omnipotent and omnipresent internet that we use to pick up that elusive recipe for chocolate mousse or the latest paper on rocket science? Or buy the must-have book from Amazon?
This is where iGoogle comes into focus. Formerly called the Google Personalized Homepage, iGoogle is a simple webpage that you can customize to reflect your tastes, priorities and needs. No, you don’t really need that latest paper on rocket science, do you?
So where do you start?
1. Open your browser, and let us say for the sake of simplicity, it is IE, although it works just as well for Firefox or any browser you may have. Type in http://www.google.com on the URL window.
2. Click on the iGoogle toolbar.
3. If you do not have a Google account, a generic iGoogle page would open up and would look something like this:
4. If you have a google account, sign in by clicking on the circled link:
5. This will take you to “your” igoogle account. (If you don’t have a google account yet, you would need to sign up for it).
6. Now make iGoogle your homepage by clicking on the link shown circled below:
7. Play around with the settings – you can add a tab, move tabs around and add applications.
8. Whoa ! Not so fast. How do you add applications? What ARE applications? This is when some rocket science comes in. (Not really).
Let us say, you want to do some last minute Christmas shopping at Amazon. You could go to Amazon’s site and get lost in the overload of information.
Or
You could add a little gadget to your iGoogle, that makes life simpler and the season jollier. You go to the bluebarb gadget page and add the gadget you need into your igoogle home page.
For example, if it is amazon you are looking for; the blue barb Amazon minisearch gadget should work just fine.
And Voila
No more last minute scurrying for Christmas gifts. You have a good 7 months ahead of you, give or take a few days to buy that book on fancy recipes to gift to your child who has been consuming incinerated food ever since he went to college to study rocket science.
Posted on: Sunday, May 25, 2008 at 3:53 am 
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