Tour of Pageflake

Convenience is key.

I present a one-stop source for everything you want to know (or didn't know you wanted to know!) about advertising and Asian Pacific American identity. I was able to do this through Pageflakes, which is a great site that allows you to easily create your own webpage through the use of "flakes." These flakes enable you to display and arrange any of your favorite sites all in one place... as long as they have an RSS feed.

This is what you can expect to find on my page:

RSS FEEDS

RSS feeds are very convenient in that they let you follow a website without having to go to the original page every single time. If you link to a website's RSS feed, you will automatically see any updates that are made on the page itself. On the right side of my pageflake, I have listed 11 RSS feeds. Now, as you can recall from a previous post, I struggled a lot with finding blogs that tailored to my very specific topic of interest. The majority of blogs talked about advertising in general. To compensate, I found a few very good Asian American culture blogs. So, on my pageflake you will find my RSS feeds divided into two sub-categories: 1) culture blogs and 2) advertising blogs. They will be updated whenever the blogs' writers post something new. I found a few posts that touched on Asian American stereotypes and the cultural consequences of targeted advertising (1, 2, 3). You may have to wait, but if you're patient, you might find a few gems that pertain to exactly what you are looking for.

ACTIVE SEARCHES

On the top left, there are a couple of search engines available. The first two are the Universal News Search and Universal Blog Search flakes. To get started, I've already entered some key words that I thought would turn up some good information. For News Search, I used the term "Asian Americans in advertising." Since experience has shown that Asian Americans are rarely shown in advertising, whatever information, pages, articles, etc. that come up should give some good insights on how (if) they are being portrayed and what that means. Under Blog Search, I already entered a blog that I knew about and thought was interesting but did not have a workable RSS feed. If you type in "Asian Americans in advertising" you can try to find some other good blogs, but as stated before, they are very few to come by. And just for fun, I've added a Wikipedia search because the site is a good source for any background information and context. Lastly, there is a video search. On the off-chance you do find a commercial portraying Asian Americans (e.g. Skittles), you can look them up here.

DIIGO BOOKMARKS

Diigo is another social bookmarking site (remember Delicious?). When I was researching for academic peer-reviewed articles on my topic, I bookmarked them onto Diigo. I found some really great articles that talked specifically about the types of Asian American stereotypes found in magazine and television advertisements as well as their effects on identity and personal self-awareness. Just like with Delicious, I was able to organize all my bookmarks by using several tags. What's different is that on my pageflake, I added RSS feeds of my Diigo tags. The tags I used are "advertising," "asianamerican," "marketing," and "identity." Therefore, articles that I saved with those specific tags will show up in the RSS feeds, and any future article I add on Diigo that contain those same tags will also be added to the feed.

SOULMATE'S BOOKMARKS

As I predicted, my soulmate proved to be another good source on my topic (In fact, it was through him that I found some more interesting culture blogs). Similar to Diigo, I added RSS feeds of his bookmarked articles/pages based on his tags. The tags that I believed would garner some useful information were "advertising" and "asianamerican." And just to be a bit more specific, I added on RSS feed of the two tags together. Hopefully, an article that MixedMediaWatch bookmarks as "advertising + asianamerican" will show up on my pageflake. You will find his feeds on the bottom left.

ZOTERO/CITELINE BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lastly, I did a bit of extra work by reading some of those peer reviewed articles. I did this through Citeline by way of Zotero (It's super convenient because they create a bibliography for you!). My annotations will tell you exactly what the studies were trying to discern, how they collected their data, what were the results, and why they were important. Most importantly, the annotations will tell you how the articles differentiate from each other. So if you want an article specifically on stereotypes, or one specifically about identity, then you can just read the article descriptions and see which ones would be most helpful to you. As you can see, I also evaluated several books. They were good sources because they took an in-depth look at their respective topics as well as provided a context. The book by Chou and Feagin concentrated on a specific Asian American stereotype (the "model minority"), and Dr. Philip's book gave a very helpful analysis of how minorities formulate their identities. Both findings relate to and can be applied to the other online articles that I found. The bibliography is located on the left side of the pageflake.

The information you need is right here in a user-friendly (and might I add, visually appealing) format! I hope this saves you hours and hours of internet exploring. Happy searching!