Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Portals Mail List

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:5/14/1999; 7:09:53 AM
Topic:Portals Mail List
Msg #:6207
Prev/Next:6206 / 6208

Buried at the end of the docs for myUserLand.root are subscription instructions for the new Portals mail list. The list is just getting started, yesterday I wrote the welcome message for the mail list, and am cc'ing it here so a discussion can go on in both places. The main purpose of the mail list is to coordinate work in this area around the myUserLand.root source code release, and to foster a cooperative development environment.

Welcome!

First, I'd like to officially welcome everyone to this new mail list.

I chose the name "portals" to be the list for myUserLand.root because that's what I think it is. The idea is to have a distributed portal. Not just one central node that everyone hits, but to have servers that add value and services that in some way process, display, or possibly limit access to content that flows thru the network.

Some ideas

Study the competition

There's lots of prior art to study. Become a member of yahoo.com, xoom.com, hotmail.com, my.netscape.com, homestead.com, learn about the field and look for ways that a decentralized network of content aggregators can do things that the single-server based ones can't. That's our opportunity space.

Other directions

RSS is a limited format. is richer. Somehow we have to integrate format into myUserLand.root.

Where are we going?

UserLand's current direction is to build content tools for writing and managing sites that flow out thru these channels. We're going to put some great editorial tools around this concept, and servers that generate RSS files to flow thru this network that we hope develops.

Who are you?

I'd like to find out who's here, what your interests are and where you'd like to see this go. And if you want to contribute programming work to the project, even better!

My invite to open source this is real. I wrote about it on discuss.userland.com. I would really like to see an independent community-based development effort gather around this. We could really go places.

http://discuss.userland.com/msgReader$5881


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