Chapter 18. Building a Personal Portal
| by Robert Flenner In This Chapter
The sample application presented in this chapter demonstrates distributed content management, file sharing, and publishing content over the Web using P2P shared spaces and XML metadata definitions. Portals became popular in the late 90s. The idea was to become the "hot spot" on the Internet for your industry. Initially, generic portals emerged. These were focused on information across all industry segments, with a special focus on finding information on the Web. Leaders like Yahoo!, Netscape, and Lycos quickly emerged as portals for searching and advertising products. They became the first logical search engines and directories for the new Internet economy. They actually provided the first ontologies for Web content. To this day, most sites still mimic the definitions and organization that these sites established. In effect, they defined the concepts still prevalent on Web sites today. Businesses often offer categories such as "Products and Services," "About Us," "Search," "Chat," and so on. Quickly industry-specific portals began to emerge. Their services were not as generic as the first informational offerings. They focused on industry-specific topics, which complemented their products and services. eBay in effect became the portal for personal auctions, E*Trade the portal for stock trading, and Amazon.com the portal for retail books. Today, there are e-markets and trading hubs that dot the Internet landscape. They have taken the portal concept and the "hot spot" idea to new levels of business-to-business electronic commerce. |
