If you were going to invent the portal today, would you?

I'm at LIFT in Geneva (on a wonky wifi connection). Tomorrow I'm giving a short open stage talk on 'Blowing up the Web'. My point is that all content needs to be loosed in the smallest particles possible (widgetised) - then it will reform itself into valid and relevant units, driven by the consumers of that content. One unspoken issue underlying this is the concept of 'portal death'. So I was happy to see Chris Schroeder writing an article on the same subject, The Death of the Portal -.

Now just looking at the collective audiences of AOL, Yahoo, MSN, and others, such a statement would seem rash, if not just plain foolish. But a deeper dig into audience behaviors raises some interesting questions. If these services didn’t offer e-mail, search, personalization via MyPages kinds of tools, and other services, what would their audiences look like? Further, how much of their “content” is consumed because it is on a portal (accessed through the home page, for example) or merely accessed from search links? How expensive are the “switching costs” to consumers who can find whatever they want just one click away?

Two examples brought this home to me. One was from my old job: At WashingtonPost.com, where we wanted to attract anyone interested in Washington to come and stay as long as possible, it stunned me that most came in at the article page level. Now that I run a network of highly targeted Web health properties, I was unsurprised to hear that when asked what the No. 1 health Web site was, a majority of WebMD users answered Google.

Consumers are in charge of their media and communications experiences and want what they want when, where, and how they want it. They’re sophisticated Internet users now, and need organizing tools on their terms to find experiences that matter to them. They don’t need walled gardens of safety where new media companies have behaved like — well — old media companies telling them what they want.

The arc of history is long, and behavior changes slowly. But if you were going to invent the portal today, would you? Why?

Comments

[Renata McGriff]

Kudos, Chris. Widgets and gadgets -- and Google! Renata