Two Random Thoughts
Hugely important, major content management systems have been spun out of CNET in some way. In the early days of the Internet, Vignette was spun out of CNET and now it is a large and lumbering public company. Matt Mallenweg moved to the bay area to work with CNET and moonlighted by writing Wordpress. It’s now a very promising startup but I don’t believe CNET invested any money in it and so will see zero benefit from its incubation. David Karp was also working for CNET (on Urban Baby) when he wrote Tumblr. Again, I don’t believe CNET invested in Tumblr. Perhaps Tumblr will be CNET’s last famous content management system? Three’s a charm.
The word portal in an Internet context is bothering. Initially it was to describe the transporting of a user to where they were looking to go to as quickly as possible. Then the tension shifted to increasing the user’s utility on the portal’s own site and not transporting them. So now we have a prevalent term that represents the exact opposite of its definition. Search is called search, but the word search really only implies the first step: the user entering in keywords. And not the actually second step, the finding, which portal does ironically perfectly capture. I doubt we will change our meaning of portal but perhaps the world would have been better place if Google would have been a ‘portal’ and MSN, Yahoo et al ‘gardens’.
