Introduction

This chapter looks at the changing role of portals, and considers what function they may serve in the future.

It is common for new technologies to be understood by relating them to older, more familiar technologies. Two consequences of this tendency are discussed: problems associated with the new technology's adoption might be ignored, and opportunities that are afforded by it are sometimes overlooked.

In the case of the internet, comparisons with print and broadcast media often ignore the fact that such means of information exchange are subject to a greater degree of quality control than the internet. They are also, however, far more constrained and less accessible than the internet.

Portals, it is argued, can help to compensate for the loss of some of the quality control mechanisms associated with other media, while allowing a level of discussion and exchange that would not previously have been possible.

A change of role

In July 1999, the retail outlet Dixons floated 20% of its Internet Service Provider, Freeserve (DSG International, 2005). The Dot Com bubble was inflating nicely at the time; Freeserve (now Wanadoo) had over a million subscribers, and there was considerable interest in the flotation (Fleming,1999).

In the preceding year, it had become conventional wisdom

The Freeserve flotation was part of what Tim Berners-Lee (1999) refers to as ‘the battle of the portals’. At the time, I remember hearing an interview with a financial pundit who expressed the view that the shares would be a good investment. Freeserve, he explained, provided a way into the internet for over a million users, and with such a large potential audience, advertisers would be as interested in Freeserve as they would in a television channel.

As McLuhan (1964) observed, a common way of coming to terms with a new technology is to relate it to an existing one: