A Good Beer Blog

Ugh, a portal. That is apparently what Google does not want said of itself.

Although Google dislikes being described as a portal, Sullivan and industry analysts said its new finance section leaves little doubt where the company is headed. “They are being fairly careful about it, but they are walking very rapidly toward becoming a portal,” said Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li. “They have a lot of other services gunning for them, so they have become most keen about building user loyalty so the users don’t have a reason to go someplace else.”

Am I loyal to Google? I use the mail, like Picasa and search through it. I map my travel with it. But am I loyal? I don’t look to it for innovations that will improve my web experience and think of this site and my browser as my portal. In the late 90s there was a urge to create portality, that control of the web. The Federal government had people shopping the idea back then holding meetings stakeholderly. One in PEI attracted millions in public money only to become a wasteland of tumblin’ tumbleweeds.

They seem to be a curse. But why? Are we all still a little Soylent Green about the internet? Do we think that anyone who wants to control us as a conduit must not have our interests in mind? I think it is more that the web is not apt for portals, that the whole thing is an annoyingly unindexed and disorganized playground of surf, idleness and interest and anything that thinks it can organize it for me bundle it all tied in a big bow is missing a point.

I’ve been wonding what this is all about for a long time so I am glad that Craig is wondering, too. Aside from the question of unauthoritative semi-fact, there is much good in the entertainment value of blogs but one simply can and should only devote so much time to being entertained. There are other things to be about in life. But the most interesting comment of his for me is this:

I am also finding old favourite blogs of less interest to me. More often than not, having a high noise to signal ratio. Many, seem to be evolving to a BBS sort of community (which is a good thing), but if you are not interested in the same types of topics that that community discusses, then interest in being part of that community wanes. Thus, I seem to be leaving the using computers and the Internet as a recreation to using same as a tool.

I think this is a very valid observation. One can only rant to oneself so long. And being cranky at the sites of others is only fun when there is mutual fun in the cranking. Things eventually have to settle down to a more honest personal diary-style of writing, writing for writing sake, topical writing, community discussion or even writing approaching what Eric Idle is quoted as saying about Monty Python: “it turns the focus back onto itself. That’s the Python key: to mock the form in which it lives.”

Conversely, there is little place for the type-A-list guru-iffic floggy fantasies as those that have taken that stance have just shown how the ego can get in the way of honest understanding. If I look now at what I thought two and half years ago about what would kill off the bloggy cacophony I would now go with RSS as being the fatal app at least in its present use of being author rather than content based. No one can reasonably be expected to pay attention to everything written by 100 or more individuals. It is too much. So then you read only those you knew or wrote well or were sharing and interest…and the A-heads. And then the futuristic A-heads proved their own dullness and showed their motives. Aggregation became the reductio ad absurdum. I thought this taggy stuff would be it but it only became another bulky impossible aggregation.

Once again, we need a topical tree to index this damn place to find the content, so you find what is actually interesting to you and not what is supposed to be (according to the blogsperts) interesting to all. Any chance of that happening?