Footprints on the Mountainside

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And another one. I’m on a paid review roll. This one rocks. If you own any kind of business or service that you are trying to promote, this one is fun and useful. It is the Brand Strength Test - provided by Branding.

You have to answer 12 questions related with your brand identity and you then get scores based on how well different aspects fare. For example, see the above screen shot. Those are my results. You are also offered an hour long free consultation.

Other areas of the site relate with important aspects of improving your brand identity and promoting your business. Paid, of course.

I liked the perky feel of the site. Very well designed - obviously, these guys know how to make an impact. But a flash site…… I wanted to see what happens when I don’t have flash. I got a blankish page with some links, and a small notice (that is also there in the flash page) to click here if the page is blank. Me did it, and went to a bizarre orange and white page with the same information, which clashes horribly with the previous and following pages to the text version. Oh my eyes hurt! I wonder why that one page is sitting there in those garish colours.

On the whole, a colourful experience. I love the purple of the site, and hate the orange of the solo page (normally I like orange, but not orange and white combination immediately after purple - thank you. I liked the flash version for its perkiness and the text only version for its readibility (except that page), and the test was fun and brought my attention to aspects of my business I need to consider, even while answering the questions and the results made them even more clear.

However, I discovered nothing at all that I didn’t know in this experience, so I wonder what I will gain if I were to pay them.

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This is a social networking style site, where people can pay to learn languages. Myngle is still in beta, but I fell in love with the concept. This place connects people from all over the world and helps them learn new languages.

According to their FAQs, signing up is for free, but teachers are charged a small amount for using the platform for teaching, though they can upload their profiles for free. Different teachers set their charges and a student can pick up whatever is affordable. Sounds interesting, but one thing that I’m wondering about is the credibility of the teachers.

I mean, there are no qualifications required to be a teacher here. As long as a person can provide value….. well, that’s how learning languages is, isn’t it? So, you can actually have paid informal conversations which we traditionally call practice and do them for free in the real world. I guess that’s the price of having the right kind of person handy in the online world. However, what is there to assure us, that a teacher is as good as his charges make him seem (other than hindsight)?

There is nothing about that in their FAQs. Also, nothing that can allow for a refund if a teacher is just your average teenager trying to earn big money and you discover it too late. Or, if there is such a system in place, it is not there in their FAQs.

On the whole, an interesting concept, but a new service with an unknown paid factor, which may or not deliver. I’d say, use it for its convenience, but play it by ear. There probably will be some kind of rating or feedback system (its inevitable). Use it to figure out the people you want to learn from.

For teachers, I guess this is an excellent opportunity for some handy income sitting at home. All you need is broadband, Skype and a headset (which you also need if you’re a student)

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This is what I was talking about, when I spoke of paid blogging bringing fresh ideas to writing and adding to knowledge. Of course, this is a paid post, but I’m glad to be writing this one. Honestly, if I had thought of something like this, I’d probably have blogged about it anyway.

I discovered Masterpapers.com - Thesis Writing Tips while hunting for subjects to review on Reviewme. This was a whole new train of thought. We hear of paid articles and stuff all the time, but a service that will do your research for you for educational purposes? Its the first I have heard of this (perhaps I should have gotten educated better - or used the internet more for it). I certainly could have done with help like that.

Not that I’m incapable of writing tomes myself, but I’m info hungry. So if there is something that will gather loads of relevant info for me, nothing like it. I think the strength of this service is in research. Of course, they say that they will help you write your thesis too. In fact, there’s a page with rates for a variety of stuff they can do for you including powerpoint presentations, papers at various educational levels, and what not. Sounds like a pretty tempting source of organized information, if you’re a freak for enormous quantities of well-researched data to pull from, like me.

The husband is laughing as I show him the site. He wants to know if I’m planning to go back to school. Does he know how much research a website needs? Its like being back in school, even for subjects you know about, when you have to write about them, confirm facts before immortalizing them in your name……. sure, I could do with a research service too.

Regardless, folks, if you are still studying, hop over and see if it is any use to you. They have provided some samples and stuff to give you an idea of their work quality. I can’t say if it is good or not (even though this IS a review) simply because I have never used them, or any other service like them for comparison, but I think their site is definitely worth investigating if you need well written documents that need a good amount of research.