Writing Hurts

There was a time when portals were the next big thing. Yahoo, MSN, all the big Web companies wanted you to set them as your homepage and use them to navigate. They’d offer you sports scores, headlines, TV listings, whatever you wanted to see.

You don’t hear much about it, but leave it to Google to re-invent the idea. For more than a year, the homepage on every computer I use is my iGoogle personalized homepage. I can change what I see on there pretty easily, and through the magic of AJAX, it loads and re-loads seamlessly.

A news site isn’t likely to make a similar idea work. But they can leverage what Google’s already doing. You can add RSS feeds to your homepage by hand, and a lot of times I do just that. But it wouldn’t take much work to have an online person create a “gadget” that people can search for and add to the page. It would get people who might not be comfortable using RSS looking at what’s on the site. And you could let the reader customize the stories they see, as well. We need eyes looking at our content. Who cares where they link from?