{"id":811,"date":"2006-12-10T13:17:12","date_gmt":"2006-12-10T18:17:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2006\/12\/10\/what-the-heck-is-a-portal-anyway\/"},"modified":"2006-12-10T13:17:12","modified_gmt":"2006-12-10T18:17:12","slug":"what-the-heck-is-a-portal-anyway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2006\/12\/10\/what-the-heck-is-a-portal-anyway\/","title":{"rendered":"What the heck is a portal anyway?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Among other things, a post today<\/a> by my friend Scott Karp over at Publishing 2.0 has helped crystallized for me just how inadequate a lot of the terminology is that we’re using for Web services and communities — and not just the obvious kind of cringe-inducing terms like “user-generated content.” In his post, entitled Platforms Are The New Portals, Scott discusses Edgeio and a post<\/a> that Keith Teare has written about the “de-portalization of the Internet.”<\/p>\n

Scott says that “user-centric platforms” such as YouTube and MySpace are acting more like portals, and that Yahoo is an old-school portal because it doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t create most of the content it aggregates, and because “it aggregates it by hand, so it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a closed system and therefore less efficient than the platforms.”<\/em> In Scott’s view, Yahoo is a portal but YouTube is a platform, in that it allows people to upload things (VC Fred Wilson has written about Yahoo and “de-portalization” here<\/a>).<\/p>\n

But at the same time, he says<\/a>, “even a platform like YouTube that embraces the distributed nature of the web is still acting like a portal, because YouTube is THE place to upload your videos and THE place to find your videos.”<\/em> Scott asks why video content owners can’t do what blogs do and publish their content wherever they want, and then with a good search engine “It won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t matter where the video is hosted.”
\n<\/em>
\n\"timeportal.jpg\"<\/p>\n

In conclusion, Scott says: “The challenge for any company that wants to scale in the distributed age is to create a platform that acts as a distributed portal \u00e2\u20ac\u201d still a de facto gateway, but one that exists across the web.”<\/em> This is no slight against Scott, but that sentence made my head hurt. And the more times I read it, the more my head hurt. So you have to be a platform, but one that is a distributed portal; a gateway, but one that exists “across the web.” <\/p>\n

The worst part is, I think he’s right. It’s just the language that is making things difficult. What is a “gateway” or a “portal” or a “platform?” If I had to try and imagine something like what Scott is talking about, it would be a new kind of television — one that is hooked up to the Web, and has a powerful search engine, and shows me content not just from the TV networks but from anywhere (like this kind of stuff<\/a>), using tags and keywords and smart filtering and Digg-style voting and search. <\/p>\n

What to call it? A plat-port-way. A way-form-tal. A whatever. I want one.<\/p>\n

Update:<\/b><\/p>\n

Leigh Himel’s friend Peter says the network is the portal<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Among other things, a post today by my friend Scott Karp over at Publishing 2.0 has helped crystallized for me just how inadequate a lot of the terminology is that we’re using for Web services and communities — and not just the obvious kind of cringe-inducing terms like “user-generated content.” In his post, entitled Platforms … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “What the heck is a portal anyway?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=811"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}