"Dive into the sea of thought, and find there pearls beyond price"

More possibilities are appearing on the web for users to collect, curate if you will, what they find in order to save it and to share and collaborate with others.  Pearltrees is one such site that states:

Why use Pearltrees?

• To cultivate your interests.
• Pearltrees is a place to collect, organize and share everything you like on the web.
• You can keep at hand the web pages you like and enrich your account with Pearltrees from other members of the community.

Pearltrees is a free service.  Users can browse and access Pearltrees without creating an account but to create new pearls and pearltrees an account is necessary.  Users must be 18 years of age or have guardian or parental permission to use this application.  To create an account choose a username, enter in your email address and create a password.  The terms of service must be accepted.

When you are registered you are taken to a page which asks you to fill in optional information to complete your profile:  your real name, location, website, mini bio, preferred language (French or English, this company is based in France) and whether you wish to upload an avatar.

Next you are asked if you wish to connect to Twitter and Facebook the pearls you add as well as the new pearltrees.  It also asks if you wish to add pearls as links to what you post or tweet.  The final option connects everything.  Being the new kid on the block, I did not connect anything.

Step three is the installation of the pearler, an extension on Internet Explorer. Once installation is complete three icons appear on your browser tool bar:  the pearl icon, an icon showing which pearltree is open giving the user the ability to work within that pearltree, others that have been previously created or a new one and the final icon representing going to your account.

With the beginning of a reading incentive tied to the Iditarod at our middle school, The Idita-Read, I decided to make a pearltree including the official Iditarod web site along with several musher web sites. 

I went to the individual web sites clicking on the pearl icon on the web browser tool bar to add them to the pearltree named Iditarod.  I was also able to create another pearltree named Official Iditarod Website pages which I was able to drag and attach to the Official Iditarod website pearl. 

Within the Pearltrees user page are a variety of tools to enhance your experience.  The tool bar across the top allows for searching for related interests, checking on team and pearltree events, search pearltrees, a listing of your pearltrees, settings (identity, account, language, notifications, password, the ability to import web sites from Delicious, the ability to export your pearltrees by changing them into a W3C-compliant RDF file or invite people) and a help section.

The inset which appears in a current pearltree can be minimized but it allows you to embed a pearltree with HTML code in four different sizes, create a tiny URL or an original URL link of a pearltree, email a pearltree, tweet on Twitter or post on Facebook your pearltree and you can recommend pearls and pearltrees to people already a part of your team or who have picked your pearltrees.  You can also edit individual pearls by deleting, duplicating or moving them. 

Any time you click on an individual pearl (website) it becomes the inset.  By clicking on that image you are taken to that web page.  You can move through all the individual pearls using the previous and next arrows along the top or go back to the Pearltrees site where you are working.

At the bottom of the screen a series of icons provide the installing of the pearler, adding a new pearl or pearltree, invite, connect to Twitter or Facebook or connect to a mind-mapping pearltree.  You can increase or decrease the appearance of your pearltree on the page or delete and recover it.

This curation tool is simply amazing.  I am happy to have discovered it through a tweet by Literacyhead last week.

The quote used for the title of this post is by poet Moses Ibn Ezra.