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www.ecommerce-guide.com/news/trends/article.php/891621
By Alexis Gutzman September 25, 2001 A few years back, portals sites that offered a broad array of resources and services, such as news, e-mail, forums, search engines, etc. sprouted up all over the Internet. Recently, we've seen the number of players in this field pared down to only a dozen or more contenders. The current trend has been that the most successful portals are those that focus on a single industry and try to organize existing information in a useful way for people who need to stay on top of that industry. There's only one Yahoo!, after all. Whatever information an industry portal lacks, at the very least, it should be able to provide links to sites that have the relevant information. A good portal leaves no need for further searching. Portals may be struggling from a revenue perspective, but from a visitor's perspective, a good portal is worth bookmarking. Of course, most portals do leave something to be desired. The challenge most portals face is in indexing a huge and growing body of information. They try to overlay chaos - the way information is created wherever it is created - with order. There are many organizational methods they can use: alphabetically by topic, in order of the popularity of the topics, by geography, in date sequence, by project phases, or something entirely different. It's nice when they choose the organizational scheme that you prefer, but it's not uncommon to find that they organize the information in a counter-intuitive way, leaving you clicking around aimlessly. One portal is taking the polar opposite approach to organizing information. I call it an "organic portal." The first organic portal that's been created is Cancer Treatment World. However, rather than amass all the information that's been published on cancer treatment, this portal creates nodes or meeting rooms in which visitors can discuss the treatments. Each visitor can post articles, comments, or experiences with treatments in the meeting rooms, with topics that range from early detection of a particular type of cancer to late-stage treatment. This may seem like old hat, something similar to Internet discussion forums and news groups, but the underlying organization is a revolutionary new approach to information exchange, which has been taken from the insect world. The creator of this portal, the legendary Peter Small, author of "The Entrepreneurial Web" explains, "The idea of an information system that starts with no information is not an easy proposition to accept. This is where it helps to understand how colonies of ants use a similar system to guide each other to sources of food. As ants search for food, they create a record of their pathways by laying scent (pheromone) trails. They don't use an electronic computer; they use the landscape - which acts as the hardware - to store the pathways to information. "Trails that lead to sources of food are continuously reinforced, through the movement of ants as they go backwards and forwards from their nest as they collect the food. Trails that don't lead to sources of food are not reinforced and quickly evaporate. In this way, a record of trails is continuously being laid and updated, dynamically mapping all known routes to current sources of available food. "If sources of information are substituted for sources of food, it can be seen how a similar system might be used by people to guide each other to information. Cancer Treatment World emulates this system by providing a virtual landscape where people can lay trails to sources of information they have discovered. By arranging for these trails to end at clearly defined focal points (meeting rooms), followers of the trails can deposit pointers to the information they have discovered at places where other interested parties will find them. These end points can then grow into rich sources of information, each focused on a particular narrow subject area." Cancer Treatment World takes into consideration the reluctance of people to get involved in community projects. It provides each visitor with an invisible set of genes - in the form of javascript modules built into Web pages - that allow them to read and lay pathways without being consciously aware that they are interacting with the environment. Visitors don't have to interact personally in the meeting rooms. They can create personal agents that can interact with others on their behalf. This is the very antithesis of the conventional database solution to the distribution of information. It doesn't start with information. It doesn't even start with the organization of information. Both are emergent properties of the system. This makes Cancer Treatment World uniquely different from all other Web-based information portals. Although this first organic portal is aimed at providing information in the field of cancer treatment, the underlying system is generic and can be applied to a large variety of areas. Environments where teamwork is valued and rewarded might be able to benefit from this organic approach. Corporate Intranets come immediately to mind. Also crafting clubs and corporate knowledge bases. How much more intuitive would it be to diagnose and repair a computer problem if you could see a series of queries about the problem, with each answer taking you to more specific queries eventually culminating in a node where information from others who have traveled the same path resides? Portals are definitely here to stay. The organic portal, which turns the information-organization process on its head, is a model that definitely has something to offer where the community involved exists harmoniously, working together like ants in a hill. Alexis D. Gutzman is an author, speaker, and consultant on e-business and e-commerce topics. She's the producer of The Online Marketing Report. Her most recent book, The E-commerce Arsenal: 12 Technologies You Need to Prevail in the Digital Arena, was named one of the 30 best business books of this year. For up-to-date information about her research and speaking engagements, visit The Alexis Gutzman Group's Web site. |
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