Fascinating discussion -- strategic, technical, operational, functional --
how many times do you see all these come up in a thread?

Anyway, some thoughts that I've had reading through the stream on a
Saturday morning in Oz:

- Thanks to Bill Hutchison for the pointer to his work.  One of the
struggles, regardless of the collective access method, is the language used
and the ambiguity within and across cultures and 'versions' of the same
language [e.g. British English, American English, Australian English etc
and one would assume the Francophones and Spanish as well], not even
considering domain specific use of language.  I've noted his products for
future consideration in Agrigate and other "portal"/gateway projects I'm
involved in.

- People may or may not want to use the features on a portal or any other
net service for that matter IF they knew what the services do, the
consequences of using them [privacy etc.], that the services are reliable
and not changing every six months when someone gets a new 'great idea' and
has to re-engineer the thing to accommodate it, and that it's easy and
obvious to the user without a lot of demands [you MUST upgrade to browser
v2.895Z, or else this system won't work and you're a dummy if you don't
even if it will screw up your entire desktop and make everything else crash]

We've been talking a lot about informed consumers in other arenas of
technology development lately and seldom do we see the
effort/benefit/understanding balance reached in timing with the development
cycle pattern [bleeding edgers, early adopters, mainstreamers, laggards] to
match the implementation of the technology.  Is there such a word as
'unsyncness'?

- Mucking around on the net with a range of tools is part of the 'fun' and
serendipity of the experience.  Sometimes you want 'the answer' and
sometimes you want the challenge of the hunt.  The fragmentation v
clustering benefit depends on lots of things like whether it is an
open-ended problem that needs some new creative approaches [e.g. a thesis
or dissertation in education], a definite no nonsense best answer for today
[e.g. a business decision in a well established domain], or to achieve a
process [signing up for a course, buying a product where there is only one
way of doing it from one source].  Portals aren't very good on the first
because there is some attempt at 'best answer' and a 'higher authority',
sort of OK on the second because of the better defined domain that can
benefit from a few options that require comparison, and really good at the
last because there are few choices.  The aspects of the individual have
little to do with these three needs.  It's the fuzziness of the
'problem'/goal that is important.

Paul said:
>Part of this will be getting large public sector organisations in various
>places to change direction, and *not* build themselves a one-stop shop
>entry ('portal') to everything that no one will ever use.

Wow!  lots of extremes in this one - large p.s., everything, no one, ever
use.  My thought is that only large organisations can afford the
design/development/implementation that would be required for an omnibus
portal, and given the lack of an economic model that works for the private
sector [yet?] it may require a public organisation to tackle it, even if
it's just for public domain information or for research purposes before
commercialisation.

Re 'everything', probably impossible anyway due to the legacy content
that's out there [I liked the idea of layering the taxonomy on top of this
as a possible solution].

Re 'no one', :-) .  How many is enough?  We chat about that with Agrigate
from time to time, but it's not a variable of success that I've pushed
since the use is consistent, although more would be nice.  Target audience
is a concept that has been around in marketing a long long time, so I doubt
very much if universal portals are going to change that thinking very much.

Re 'ever use', over time there are always new options and those bleeding
edgers and early adopters will move on to the latest widget.  So services
will get that, but the bigger question is what is an acceptable life of use
before the shift happens?

- Branding is also part of the 'marketing' paradigm.  The rights to IP
isn't going away, so the idea of re-serving content from a portal is still
struggling.  Heck, deep linking is even getting a new lease on life as a
'no go'.  Back to the public service leading, at least there deep linking
is a bit more acceptable, even though their portal implementations wouldn't
support this [see next point]. Jurisdiction also comes into play here --
big time.

- From experience here in Australia, the agencies going to portals are
moving things and 'hiding' things from discovery by nature of the portals
themselves.  Resources that we indexed are often requiring re-indexing
because of the implementation of a portal that buries the resource behind a
very incomprehensible, and sometimes dynamic, URL.  Our solution has been
to bump up a level in our index to the portal and put the portal URL under
General Agriculture.  We lost the access to the article, lost the value add
that we were providing by describing an article/resource benefits to our
audience, essentially watering down the services we could provide.  I just
dealt with one for Dairy Research where this was the case.  The host portal
did away with Dairy as a topic in its own taxonomy, putting it under Animal
Production.

Pity this discussion didn't come up earlier because the Australian Subject
Gateway Forum is meeting in Melbourne next week. It would have been
interesting to explore this with them.  One topic we will be talking a lot
about is 'sustainability', and how those that are still going are doing
that.  But maybe we have enough Interop subscribers that we can incorporate
some of this discussion.

I also have a little topic on the agenda for the regulatory environment
[copyright, IP, licensing, etc.] a la
 > >>Database Legislation Introduced in U.S. Congress
 > >>http://digbig.com/3dhr
which is [according to the email posting] in early October:

 > >>From: gary <[log in to unmask]>
 > >>Date: Sat Oct 11, 2003  08:02:32 Australia/Canberra
 > >>To: Multiple recipients of list <[log in to unmask]>
 > >>Subject: [WEB4LIB] Database Legislation Introduced in Congress

 > From the article, Critics warn that under new federal legislation,
 > >>> writers and Web designers could be hauled into court over something
as simple as
 > >>publishing a list of local sporting events or creating a Web site offering
 > consumers price comparisons on car parts. Though the Database and
Collections of
 > Information Misappropriations Act was only introduced Thursday, special
interests
 > >>have been lining up on either side to sing its praises or curse its
existence. The
 > >>legislation, crafted by members of the House Judiciary and Energy and
 > >>Commerce Committees, seeks to place legal protections on online and
offline
 > >>databases. In short, the measures contained in the bill would prevent
the reproduction
 > of information gathered in databases for commercial and competitive
 > purposes.
 > >>
 > >>Full-Text of the article, links to steaming video of a recent hearing
 > >>about this bill, full-text of the legislation can be found here. I've
also posted a
 > ALA Washington Office Newsline with additional info.
 > >>
 > >>http://digbig.com/3dhr
 > >>

More from ALAWON at: http://freepint.com/gary/alawon.htm

anyone have an update on this little gem and how it may fit in this portal
discussion?

Jan

Agrigate Project Coordinator
JLWhitaker Associates
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
[log in to unmask]  --  http://member.melbpc.org.au/~jwhit/whitentr.htm