Blake Schwendiman's Blog and Blook

This is my übergeek entry for the week.

If you haven't noticed, big changes are afoot on the web again. A few years ago everyone was talking about and/or building a portal. The idea of the portal was that people would use that primary web site as a launching point to the rest of the web. Think Yahoo!, MSN, etc. These large sites provided enormous home pages covered with news, weather, stocks and searches. They tried to be everything to everyone, but the problem was that for the end user it was too much for anyone. For me, a homepage like that never worked -- too much stuff.

Enter the personal homepage. Google has it. I've been talking about that for a while. Microsoft is developing Windows Live. And there is Pageflakes, right now it may be my personal favorite. Basically the idea of the personal homepage is to provide every person with a customizable start page for the web. For me, my page includes the latest news about Harry Potter, the latest movie news, traffic information for my area, my Netflix.com account information and the current value of Chipotle's stock. You may not care about any of this stuff, but the cool thing is that you can still use the same homepage and customize it for what you do want to see. It's like a funnel for the vastness of the web.

If you haven't yet created a personal homepage, give it a try. Pageflakes is entirely free and open to anyone. Try it. You'll like it!