So one of the tasks is to create our own personal learning portal using iGoogle. I had played around with iGoogle some years ago, but never found a good use for it. Not sure what problem iGoogle could solve for me. Amazingly enough, iGoogle does not appear to have evolved in the past few years, so my impression is that Google does not love the product very much itself.

I already had described the way I see my own PLE, and how it works for me.

Naturally, I tried to replicate what I now have in iGoogle, that lead to quite some disappointment.

• Searching for gadgets to add to your iGoogle page made me wonder: is this Google?? Try a search for 'editor' (I wanted a replacement for Notepad). You'll get results that have really nothing to do with what you're looking for, very unlike Google.
• No gadget to connect to files. As an alternative I finally created a Dropbox account and added the Dropbox widget, or gadget. Works, but I guess that uploading my library would take about a day.
• I can't find a way to add links to the iGoogle page, I would have liked a link to, for instance, the Holyrood Park Hub. A workaround might have been a gadget for delicious, but searching for delicious only seem to give gadgets related to cooking.
• Amazingly enough, there are no gadgets for the Google products that I use frequently: Google reader, Google Docs.
• I found a way to add Google Mail, but that's only handy to check whether new e-mails are coming in, but then I'd need to look at iGoogle all day ;-).
• I was able to find a Webskype gadget, it does not work in Google Chrome, it appears broken in Internet Explorer.
• iGoogle has a chat option, but that is not tied to my Windows Live Messenger. I found a widget but that gave an error message in IE.
• Added a todo gadget to make a task list for IDEL week 6 and 7.

Even with the few widgets / gagdets on the page, the page is already overcrowded. See the two screendumps (igoogle1 and igoogle2 - nope, I managed before, but can't find how I did it, yet another frustration, please see the discussion board where I will repost and hopefully manage to attach the files) I made to get an overview.

So, mapping my PLE as it is right now is impossible.