Re: UKNM: Re: Portals?

[Ray Taylor]

Ray Taylor wrote:


>>The days of the portal are numbered.


Jim Sterne replied:


>Beg to differ. People need pointers. People need

>directories. The new content is out there is such

>mass quantity that the only hope for your Mum and

>her sister to find the really current, latest and

>greatest is by counting on Yahoo to bring it to

>them.

>


Of course, my point was more than a little exaggerated.


What I meant was that the biggest _growth_ would be in original content at

the expense of content aggregation. The problem with discussing "portals" is

that it is not clear what their purpose is. And of course there are some

many services that could be described as "portals".


There will always be a need for pointers and the big advantage for the Yahoo

model (as opposed to the pure search engine approach) is that you can drill

down the hierarchy. The big problem with Yahoo is that it is always

incomplete and out of date.


Portals that specialise in particular subjects are bound to be of more value

to the user interested in that subject than general portals and so it

follows that the best portal to use would be one that had a complete list of

other portals (On the basis that the Web is too big and changes to rapidly

for any one portal to do a proper job of it).


But six or seven big portals is as many as there ever will be. And no doubt

just as the search engines / directories adapted to the "portal" model as

the money moved away from searching/indexing, so they are likely to adapt to

moves away from the portal model into more comprehensive original content.


Launching yetanother new portal is likely to be financial suicide whereas

launching the right original content service would be a financial winner if

properly invested. But then for every one that does the job properly there

will be thousands that do it all wrong.


Ray Taylor

NMC/Adplan