Since attending the PLE workshop, I’ve been mulling over the possibility of using a Google personal page as a form of PLE.

I’ve already downloaded Google Notebook, which resides on the lower bar of the browser. I’ve got several different feeds onto my personal page (Gmail, Google Reader, BBC news etc.,), however, there are some things that I can’t get. Oddly, it’s not possible to have bookmarks on the home page – so I can’t like, for example to my Google webpages , Writely account or Google Spreadsheets, should I want to create something.

However, I’ve recently found Google Modules, which allows you to add more modules to the home page, and Google themselves seem to have more options, judging by the list they offered me this morning of “new tools”.

Google has definitely grown massively since I did my MSc project – when I was looking at search engines. Then, other students looked at me oddly as I was extoling the virtues of this new search engine I’d found (1999), today, they look at me oddly when I suggest that they might like to try other search engines! (Look at the Google page & the lower logo – it says “Beta”!)

Added:
I seem to have found a strange interaction. When I’m editing a post in here, if I’ve got the Visual Rich Text editor on, and I select some text (not uncommon!), I get the Google Notebook floating button sometimes. That can, (not always), add some hidden HTML to the page … I was going to try to quote it here, but even enclosing it with code tags seemed to cause confusion (The code had google in it, which is what allowed me to work out what it was). Once it’s there, it mucks the whole blog up, until it’s removed. But, as it’s hidden, it can take time to work out which is the offending post.
Luckily, it’s not too big a problem, as I’ve just discovered I can disable the floating button & just use the “Note this” option in the right click menu. It was frustrating this evening though, knowing I’d done a lot of posts – and one of them was clearly doing something that was confusing it…

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