Good morning, all,

as it's Friday (except, admittedly, in a few Pacific islands, so 
apologies to readers in Pago Pago, Apia, Chatham Island, or Kiritimati) 
it seems ok to have a little on-list ponder about a portal issue that's 
bothering me.  (For those in a hurry, the question is right at the 
end!).

It's probably important to state that what follows is a personal 
viewpoint...   :-)

I argue in the current Ariadne 
(http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/miller/) that the things which make a 
portal a *PORTAL*, and distinguish it from other services out there, 
are it's ability to customise, personalise, and integrate.

If we accept that to be true (and I do!), then perhaps the trickiest 
bit is surely the personalisation. Customisation is about letting the 
user choose things like colours, skins, and the types of channel they 
see (I want subject-specific news, please). Personalisation, though, is 
about the system using the customisation and knowledge it has about the 
user to deliver the approriate content (you asked for subject-specific 
news, and I know you're an Engineer, so here's the feed from EEVL...).

In doing this, institutional and other organisational/corporate portals 
have clearly got it made; you don't need to TELL it you're an 
Engineering lecturer, a student of Archaeology, or the Senior 
Salesperson for little green widgets, because it hooks right into your 
staff/student/HR record system and just *knows*...  Equally, assuming 
the little problem of Data Protection is handled appropriately, the 
portal might pull information on disability (you're colour blind, so 
here's the high-contrast skin...) etc from the system, and tailor the 
experience for you quite effectively. None of this means, importantly, 
that you can't choose things other than what the portal picks for you; 
it's merely helping you to shape your own landscape, and giving you a 
head-start...

All those big national portals building themselves have a bit more of a 
problem, though, don't they?  Experience from the corporate sector 
appears to suggest that, given customisation options on things like MSN 
and the like, people tend not to actually *use* them very much.  Given 
just how many portals there are, all striving to be a place I go to the 
exclusion of all else (yeah, right!), just how many people are going to 
want to give all of them the information to enable them to personalise 
content delivery for the user. There are rights issues, currency 
issues, privacy issues, and sheer pain-in-the-neck issues in doing so.  
Activities such as those being undertaken by the Liberty Alliance help 
to a degree, in ensuring that appropriate information moves 
appropriately in response to appropriate requests between appropriately 
authorised and mandated services.

A larger part of the solution, though (and I've said this before), is 
simply for an awful lot (not all) of the big 'national' portals to go 
away. We don't need them. We (I, anyway) don't WANT them.  We *do*, 
however, want their content. We *do* want their services. In some 
cases, we also want the authority of their underlying brand. We simply 
want all that delivered to us in our portal of choice, and our portal 
of *choice* isn't necessarily theirs!  So - more work on the machine to 
machine, the Shared Services, the WSRP, the SOAP, the RSS 
(appropriately formatted a la http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/miller/ 
of course!), the SRW, and much less of the budget on website and 
marketing, please.

Again, the institutional portals have something of a captive market. 
The staff and students of a portal-ised college or university will 
increasingly turn to the portal all day, every day. It's got their 
timetable. It's got a mechanism for submitting their coursework. It's 
got their exam results, and the wee tool that lets them book a room. 
It's got their e-mail. It should also have, should it not, a means of 
delivering all that other content out there... and the means needs to 
be more than just a Google box (which has a place) or a list of links 
to other websites (which doesn't, beyond a very few).

What, though, about everyone else?  Where is *their* portal of choice 
going to be? Is it their ISP? Is it a market that is crying out for 
someone to step in?  It's *not*, surely, their public library, UK 
Online, or an RDN Hub...  Or is it?

And what about people's different roles? My institutional portal might 
be my portal of choice at the moment... but what about when I get home 
tonight, and am online for reasons other than work? Do I want (at 
least) a home choice and a work choice, or can one meet my needs?

Let the yelling commence...  ;-)

Paul

  -- dr. paul miller --------------------------- [log in to unmask] --
     project manager, portal project      www.fair-portal.hull.ac.uk/
     interoperability focus, ukoln     www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/
  ------------------------------------------- tel: +44 (0)1482 466890 --