First some background on Pageflakes

With Pageflakes, you just sign in quickly to the website, add url’s (‘flakes’) to your page (‘pagecast’), shuffle them around in priority of importance, create a snazzy background and off you go. This is now your new home page instead of having to rummage through many websites on a daily basis. You can see all your favorite websites on one page and can create additional pages based on themes i.e. cookery, sports, fashion, celebrities or your own enterprise & business updates etc. Upload videos, use the ‘anything flake’ to add personal messages, calendars and more. Users can chat with other pagecast users directly or through the community section, copy flakes and discuss like-minded topics.

Education:

Pageflakes are working with local schools and educational boards to help them organize their class schedules. Teachers are using Pageflakes as the main site for their students to see update calendars, exam timelines, research study information, grade trackers, message boards and the list continues… Check out a few below:

1. Homepage platform to set up all educational needs: http://teacher.pageflakes.com/
2. Class Schedule: http://www.pageflakes.com/Community/Content/Flakes.aspx?moduleKey=6028&filter=0
3. 3. Grade Tracker: http://www.pageflakes.com/Community/Content/Flakes.aspx?moduleKey=757&filter=0
4. Message Board: http://www.pageflakes.com/Community/Content/Flakes.aspx?moduleKey=3877&filter=0

Socially:

In addition, Pageflakes have now created a series of ‘open’ Pagecasts for the consumer to use as an ongoing campaign – whether you’re a Pageflakes registered user or not. Some of the themes are below and more are to come throughout the year (Mothers Day, sporting events, national holidays etc). Anyone can see these from clicking the links or signing in and looking in the community section. These theme pagecasts have been produced by Pageflakes using both new flakes and incorporating flakes from existing pagecast users:

• www.pageflakes.com/superbowl
• www.pageflakes.com/valentinesday
• www.pageflakes.com/carnaval – Mexican Carnival

Comments

I was going to write about Blizzard this morning; however, I then saw that the Pageflakes site was down.  A temporary page said, “We’ll be back at about 10am PDT (1pm EDT, 7pm CET).  Stay tuned!”  It looked planned, and I figured I could wait.  But it’s now about 2:20 PM on the East Coast, and the message is still in place.  Hmph.

In any event, Pageflakes users should at some point benefit from a number of new media partnerships.  “International partner media properties include major brands such as USA Today, Rolling Stone, CNN, Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, Entertainment Tonight, The Insider, Slate, AOL, Die Welt, Bild and others,” according to a press release.

“We’re thrilled to work with major partners that recognize the rapidly changing nature of the Internet, in which personalization is at the heart of a new generation of web media experiences,” said Dan Cohen, the CEO of Pageflakes, in the same release.  “By embracing the Pageflakes platform, our partners are now offering Pagecasts in which anyone on the web can combine their favorite print and broadcast content with new forms of media such as user-generated content and social networking.”

If you’re trying to visualize the final product, don’t bother – Mashable’s Kristen Nicole has pictures of nine different Pagecasts.  And of course, whenever the Pageflakes site begins working again, you’ll be able to view the real deal there.

Now, however, “Startpage Pageflakes is preparing [the] latest version of its offering, entitled Blizzard,” reports Mashable’s Kristen Nicole.  “The launch was originally planned for today, but has been pushed back until July to incorporate more feature requests from users.”

Neither Mashable (which provides a disclaimer saying Pageflakes is a sponsor) nor the Pageflakes site itself provides a more specific date.  The Next Net and TechCrunch, which are also covering these developments, didn’t have that information, either.

As for the update itself, some features of Blizzard sound interesting, but remain up in the air.  “Included in this newest version may be more Pagecasts from media companies such as CBS, The Washington Post and People,” according to Nicole – and those would be some powerful partners, indeed – but “these too are liable to change.”

In other words, we may still have all buzz and no bee.

Hopefully that’ll change in the near future, however.  And don’t disregard these rumors as a Pageflakes publicity stunt – an editor’s note at Mashable states, “Pageflakes isn’t particularly happy about this story coming out now, especially since the features won’t be live until July.  However, since some blogs have jumped the gun a little, we thought we’d try to clear up some points . . .”

Tuttle, Truveo’s CEO and co-founder, attributed the continuing growth to the burgeoning demand for easily finding video online. “We

Intranets, on the other hand, haven’t progressed an inch since, oh, say 2001. While the web has witnessed the wide-scale adoption of social networking and the early stages of true web-based applications (like Writely and AjaxWrite), the intranet of 2006 looks pretty much the same as it did five years ago.

I know because intranet audits are a staple of my consultancy. I see a lot of intranets, and have since…well, since before the word “intranet” was adopted. I’m working on three of these audits at this moment. And although there are plenty of fine features and functionality, there is little to suggest intranet teams are adopting the characteristics of the “read-write” web.

Sure, blogs and wikis are finding their way onto intranets, but the number of companies employing these social computing tools is a bare fraction of the total number of intranets functioning today. As for the other elements of Web 2.0, I’m aware of less than a handful of intranets that have embraced notions like social tagging (as exemplified by del.icio.us (although I have heard of two companies taking initial steps in this direction), audience ranking (along the lines of Digg and Memeorandum, social networks ( like LinkedIn, file sharing services like Flickr and YouTube or AJAXish tools like PageFlakes (which has become my default home page).

All of these utilities make perfect sense forintranets, and most of them would be simple to implement. Simple, in any case, compared to, say, getting an SAP portal up and running. Social tagging would let employees find intranet content based on bookmarks their colleagues have asigned. One cmpany, for instance, calls its mailroom “Document Delivery Services;” there is no reference to “mailroom” anywhere on the intranet. If one employee found the DDS site and tagged it “mailroom,” other employees would be able to find it by searching the bookmark site for the word that makes the most sense to them.

Digg-like ranking would let employees prioritize company news and information based on what is most important to them. (The company could continue to push news it believes is so important that every employee should see it.) Social networks that emulate the likes of LinkedIn would let employees in large organizations make contact with others who can help with a project or assignment through trusted intermediaries. And personzlied web start pages like PageFlakes and ProtoPage do exactly what web portals do (at a fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time it takes companies to implement portals like the ones sold by Plumtree and Oracle.

Any of these kinds of services would make intranets infinitely more valuable, compelling, and usable for employees. So why aren’t intranet teams making the slightest move to keep up with developments on the web? There are several factors at play:

• IT departments have invested too much time and effort into developing the infrastructure of the current iteration of the intranet and are in no hurry to move in a different direction.
• Corporate IT staffs-some of them, anyway-are utterly clueless about what’s happening on the web. They don’t know online AJAX from the kitchen cleanser.
• Communicators figure the intranet is working just fine the way it is; why fix what isn’t broken?
• Corporate communicators-many of them-are utterly cluelessa bout what’s happening on the web. They wouldn’t know what Digg was even if they’d been dug.
• Too much of an investment has been made in the existing portals that haven’t produced the kind of results most companies hoped for
• The existing intranet hasn’t lived up to expectations in the first place; why invest time and effort in it now?

Most companies are struggling to retain a command-and-control structure for their intranets. Tools that put control into employees’ hands are antithetical to intranets where only authorized representatives of the company can contribute content.

There are, I’m sure, other obstacles standing in the way of intranet evolution. There are also, I’m sure, some intranets somewhere that have undertaken efforts to adopt some of these tools. I haven’t seen them; have you? Intranet teams should start taking a hard look at their stagnant intranets and how they can be improved-to the benefit of the organization through enhanced productivity-using the many elements that make up the read-write web.

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Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.

As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.

I don’t know what goes into the guts of a portal that makes it work, but I know it’s complex. Most portals cost about $1 million and take about a year to implement. Customization and personalization are the keys to a portal, particularly the selection of portlets that pull targeted content from anywhere on the network into a box on your screen. Given these options, any employee can collect a page of portlets that contain the information, data, and processes he needs most often. A lot of portal projects fail because the infrastructure works just fine, but there aren’t enough portlets for most employees to make that level of personalization worth the hassle.

I’ve been playing with a service called PageFlakes, another free Ajax-based website that lets you tailor content. Just to look at it, PageFlakes looks like a portal. There are portlets, each of which features controls that let delete it or edit its contents. For example, you can set the number of items to appear in each portlet. The portlets available come in two flavors. There are “flakes,” which most resemble the kinds of portlets available on many intranets. So far there are 37, including one that shows you the mail in your Gmail account, one that displays your local weather, another that gives you a view of del.icio.us and another through which you can conduct online chats.

The second kind of portlet is the one that intrigues me. It’s an RSS feed. Add any URL to an RSS feed, and a new portlet window displays the feed’s most current contents. The combination of “flakes” that are programmed to deliver rich content and feeds works extremely well. You can create tabs in which to collect your portlets. The default setting gives you one called “work,” one called “fun,” and one called “reading.” You can edit these and add new ones. On any given page, you can drag your portlets into different positions, tailoring the view of that page’s portlets to your interests.

All of which makes me wonder if this couldn’t be the future of intranet portals. I suppose the business behind PageFlakes could be convinced to sell their backend to a company for internal use (if that’s not already their business model). I honestly have no idea how long it would take to produce flakes for internal data (e.g., inventory numbers, etc.). I also don’t know how practical it would be to create RSS feeds for much of that data. Could an RSS feed stay updated with information from a sales database? If so, the Ajax approach to portals applied by PageFlakes could signify a quicker, cheaper approach to traditional portals like Plumtree.

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Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.

As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.