before you get bored with the view from your current cubicle

before you get bored with the view from your current cubicle. We re all free agents now, Keenan Hogg, president and CEO of Protuo, tells me. Hogg, who worked in marketing in the wireless industry, teamed up with his father, a longtime HR exec, to launch the new service last week. They hope workers of all ages in industries from consumer autoscaner electronics to public speaking might make use of the service, which costs $9.99 a month. Protuo is in discussions with employers who would also sign on for access to workers portfolios. The sample porfolios are essentially like simple, cleanly designed web sites devoted to your career. The opening page might feature a handsome photo of you, with a positioning statement, professional objective, preferred job functions and a list of competencies. It s like a colorful cover letter. Tabs on the side lead to pages listing your education and experience. Here s the fun part: if you re in advertising, say, you might upload actual ads onto a page featuring your past work. Another page might feature a job-searching blog authored by yourself. Why would you pay someone 10 bucks a month when you can autocom create your own web site for the price of a domain name? The point is the convenience, ease and access to employers, says Hogg. The site is offering free registration for a few months, so I tried it out. Registering is easy. But once I got to the part where I was supposed to design my portfolio, I was completely stumped. A page resembling a Microsoft Word document pops up accompanied by lots of icons labeled Flash Manager and Format Stripper. I had thought the site was designed for HTML dummies like me, but that s clearly not the case. Elsewhere on the site it says I am supposed to be able to adopt the skins of the sample portfolios, which I d happily do but I see no option here to do so. There s a pretty fancy product tour, but beware there s an audio element (you probably don t need your boss listening in). It looks like the team spent a lot of time on this feature.