What "Homepage" or Portal Page do you Usually log onto? (ie what page
does your browser open when you 1st go on line?)
Is it a radio station? (BBCWS or just 'BBC'? Another shortwave
station? A local all news station? etc.) A newspaper? Or other portal?
I use the My Way portal
(Don't download their toolbar--a vehicle for adware! Set it as your
Homepage. I have 100+ favorites on the right hand column & NY
Times (etc) articles linked in the middle main news section. I avoid
their (paid) search by using the Google Deskbar (Not the Google
toolbar!). Much better than "My Yahoo" & no ads!
Been using it since I read Steve Bass's column in 2002 PC World
discussing home pages and why he switched from Yahoo
What about secondary portals? Browsers like Maxthon allow you to
automatically load say 4 'Home pages' as a group...in a particular
order. (I haven't activated that on Maxthon myself).
------------
What got me thinking about all this this was a recent speech to
editors Washington by newspaper (The Times & Sun in the U.K.
& other media) mogul Rupert Murdock.
He uses the distinction between 'digital immigrants' (the over 40 crowd)
& 'digital natives.'
[Whether digital natives will ever embrace shortwave (short of the
internet infrastruce being destroyed) is a frequent topic in the SW
hobby--including SW Programs).
Murdoch suggests (not new but signifucant coming from him) that
newspapers need to fight to become their readers' Hiome Page or Portal.
Interesting also in light of the fact that when the founder of Craig's
List (a mostly free portal for want ads in many cities around the world)
was introduced at a recent newspaper conference, most of the editors said
"Craig Who?" (The Craig whose online classifieds are stealing all your print
classified revenue!
See article: "Craig Who?" by Steve Outing of Poynter.org Apr 20 '05
Chet C
======================================
Media Gardian (free registration required) Apr 14
Excerpts:
Describing himself as a "digital immigrant" in contrast to his young
daughters, who would be "digital natives", he said the internet was "an
emerging medium that is not my native language".
...Mr Murdoch, who turned 74 last month, admitted it was hard for "digital
immigrants" like him to get to grips with the challenge of the internet.
"The peculiar challenge then, is for us digital immigrants - many of whom
are in positions to determine how news is assembled and disseminated - to
apply a digital mindset to a set of challenges that we unfortunately have
limited to no first-hand experience dealing with.
"We need to realise that the next generation of people accessing news and
information, whether from newspapers or any other source, have a different set
of expectations about the kind of news they will get, including when and how
they will get it, where they will get it from, and who they will get it from."
He said consumers between the ages of 18-34 were increasingly using the web
as their medium of choice for news and neglected more traditional media.
..."The data may show that young people aren't reading newspapers as much
as their predecessors, but it doesn't show they don't want news. In fact, they
want a lot of news, just faster news of a different kind and delivered in a
different way."
He said he wanted to turns newspapers into "destinations" that rivalled the
success of the internet portals, "the Yahoos, Googles, and MSNs".
"The challenge for us... is to create an internet presence that is
compelling enough for users to make us their home page. Just as people
traditionally started their day with coffee and the newspaper, in the future,
our hope should be that for those who start their day online, it will be with
coffee and our website."