Web Portals and Quality of Information INLS310 – Seminar in Internet Policy and Future Initiative; Monday, March 20 Instructor: Paul Jones Presenter: Peter Buch

What is a web portal? Methodology The 6 biggest portals. Results Comments & questions

What is a web portal? Here is the definition I like: A collection of information streams organized into a single user interface. What portals are we looking at? The three biggest are AOL, Yahoo and MSN. I discarded AOL, because I do not have access – AOL.com is not the same as the subscription service. I substituted Northern Light, because of the perception of integrity, and because I like their mission statement: To index and classify all human knowledge to a unified consistent standard and make it available to everyone in the world in a single integrated search. What are we trying to learn about them? If these are tomorrows newspapers, what kind of news are we consuming? Do they really fill the same need as newspapers? Is the integrity of information hopelessly compromised by mingling it with advertising? Is the news degenerating into one big infomercial (Hint – Yes!) Classification methodology. Item type Content – an atomic piece of information, such as news or commentary. Service – compilation and manipulation of information, such as airline ticketing, or synopses of movie reviews by various critics. Ad – an single invitation to purchase. Item integrity Real – For content, this means content with substance, real news. For services, real means that the service reports and recommend without regard to sponsorship. For ads, it means the ad is clearly labeled as an ad. Junk, Phony – For content, this includes celebrity gossip, shallow lifestyle blurbs, sports, gratuitous psychobabble, etc. A phony service is one that will arrive at the conclusion a disproportionate amount of the time that the sponsors product is exactly what you need. A phony ad is veiled or mislabeled. Mixed – contains elements of both real and phony content and services. The results are compiled in these three spreadsheets MSN.xls Yahoo.xls NorthernLight.xls Overall classification, by item type. Overall classification as real, junk, mixed bag. Content – real or junk Services – Real, Phony or Mixed Comments and questions. There wasn’t a lot of news on the front page of any of these portals, real or phony. Does this mean that news is less important to people than newspapers thought. Do people just read what is in front of them? Or is the prevalence of services a good (or bad) application of the capabilities of the medium. The occurrence of simple veiled ads was low – 1 in Yahoo, 2 in MSN, non in Northern Lights. In my opinion, services with mixed integrity are the most insidious. But are people really fooled by recommendations that are weighted towards paying customers? There are two business models. The old business model, used by Northern Light, is to use advertisement to fund information, but to separate the two. MSN and Yahoo choose the more powerful and profitable model of co-mingling the two. Is it possible to form a third model, where the customer pays a fee to insure journalistic integrity? The author things that the total value that a gateway offers would have to be much higher for the third model to be practical.