I’d rather go canoeing !

Stumbled across this site when I was sent an email about Windows Photostory 3. More about that later. Pageflakes is a cusomisable personal website which uses WebParts or “flakes” to assemble the pages. You simply choose the flakes you want and drag them onto the page. You can put just about any content you like on the pages. Flakes are available for thousands of uses and interests, including news, sports, e-mail, local events, search, photos, music, videos – even interactive tools like a calendar and a to-do list – and just about anything else you do on the Web at school, work and at home.
You can share pages with selected individuals or with the whole world or just keep them private. The site is hosted in the US and is free for everyone. They seem to have a very clear privacy policy and there are no adverts.
In many ways this is like the Glow interface. You have a number of pages and you have control over the content and access to each page.
I can think of lots of uses for this and have seriously considered ditching “My Yahoo” which has been my homepage for the last 10 years or so!

  A question I often ask myself !!

Today I received an invitation to fill in an on line questionnaire for a large organisation which supplies ICT services and equipment. As I worked through the questions I was trying to work out what they were going to do with the information gathered. It quickly became obvious – marketing! The questions had been constructed in such a way as to illicit positive information about the company.

• “Do you think we are innovative? 1…..7″
• “Do we put learners at the heart of our business? 1….7″ etc.

Surveys like this, when properly constructed can provide useful information about the services we provide or the classes we teach. One good thing to come from this questionnairre was the last page. It was a redirect to the site which created and hosted it – SurveyMonkey. What a good site. Expect more on this later.