Read the manifesto:

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/05/29/web-strategy-how-to-evolve-your-irrelevant-corporate-website/

http://www.itsmynews.com

They have a lot of news feeds in their database and it is very easy to set up.

Have a look.

Where I work, http://www.telegraph.co.uk, the homepage plus the 13 other top channel homepages (sport, news, business, travel etc) only account for a combined 20 percent of global page impressions. Putting it another way, we get 80 percent of our traffic through means other than people coming via our channel homepages.

So why the obsession with homepages? Homepages provide the same function as shop windows - they are bait to people passing by, and they are a marketing asset. They define who we are.

But that doesn’t justify the amount of energy and time given over to homepages. So where should we focusing resource, given that none of us is flush with cash. Three areas, predominantly:

1. PULL - allow Google’s crawlers to penetrate deep into one’s archive of content through improved SEO.

2. PUSH - get on top of technology that tags content and bundles it into RSS feeds that are consumer-friendly (i.e. don’t frighten readers with terms such as RSS!)

3. Focus on article pages. The article page IS the new homepage. It’s where a reader will land first after entering a word in the Google search box. So once he or she is there, it should be an integral part of a journalist’s job to provide all relevant content to the designated search.

None of the above comes naturally for traditional media companies. We assume readers are linear in their thinking - moving seamlessly from the homepage to news, sport and business - even though the evidence points to the contrary. Pushing content is counter-intuitive because for decades readers have come to us, and not the other way round. And linking to other people’s content is still anathema in an industry that created the NIH syndrom (Not Invented Here -we didn’t write it, so you don’t need to know about it).

But change, we must.

Edward

According to Nielsen/NetRatings: “US broadband penetration broke 80% in February 2007, growing to 80.16% among active Internet users. Narrowband users connecting at 56Kbps or less now comprise 19.84% of active Internet users, down 1.09 percentage points from 20.93% January 2007″

Bring on the better web with as much media and user customization as we can make work and someone will find a way to push that envelope too. I for one, can’t wait for that melange of data to be at my fingertips.

http://www.netvibes.com/

http://www.yougetit.com/

Enjoy.

Do you have any real statistics and research to back up ypur CBGing?

pervasive immediacy, wireless everywhere.( undiscovered technologies for distribution of access)

where the limitations of hardware meet the expanse of the virtual desktop( remember sun’s CDE for their solaris based machines??)your desktop is a big as you want it( logically, not physically)

the poineering work at Yale Cs in the early 90s

http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/lifestreams.html#what

remember what david gelernter said, computers have no prejudice and have infinite memory

look up tuple space

p.s. I was also thinking about how I hate the “go to this homepage” idea of information portals

drop the home page/index page clicking paradigm

I read your suggestion of an unlimited single homepage in abject horror. A substantial percentage of web users do not have access to anything better than dial up. Such a page would take forever to transmit to those using dial up services.

Already we have the problem of companies using nifty images for buttons and menus where simple scripts and/or text would suffice. Such companies deciding to make a single, mega-homepage would produce an insufferable melange of data.

Regards,
Dann

http://projects.washingtonpost.com/staff/articles/howard+kurtz/

Mind you, none of this was conscious “i’ll show the sob’s” behavior, but something i realized when i followed a direct Instapundit link and thought “Hm. Why haven’t i read Howie for so long?”

1) applications that traditionally ran on the local host are being developed for to run remotely through the web (like Google Docs and spreadsheets),
2) Unifying ‘desktop’ sites like iGoogle, Ripl, Facebook Platform that provide APIs to hook web based applications into the desktop environment (also see my home page at http://bgok.net to see a desktop-like website),
3) mashup sites like Yahoo Tubes and Microsoft’s mashup engine (the name escapes me at the moment), and
4) mashable sites like Twitter, Jaiku, Tumblr, Google Maps, and any site with an RSS feed.

Sites will are becoming less site-like and will tend to have one or more of the above characteristics. There are some types of sites that don’t neatly fit into one of the above categories (e-commerce, tech support, wikis), but these can be thought of as applications.

If this analysis is correct, there are deep implications to the internet and information technology as we know it. Figuring out the implications will be left as an exercise to the reader…or I’ll have a few ideas in my blog entry on this topic in the next few days.

Ken Heutmaker