Contents
Personal portals by the user
Personalization and customization in web portals are usually done for the user. The primary aim is to reduce as much as possible the cognitive and physical effort that it takes for an individual to remember and organize his/her past interactions with a website and to shift this burden as much as possible to software agents acting on behalf of the user.
All good and desirable. There are better ways to spend our precious time than wracking our brains about the wheres, whens, hows, whos, and whats of our interaction with web resources. The cost of filing and organizing web resources is often not worth the gain. There are also many tools already available to organize our information. For example, bookmark organizers abound - see this list of URL organizers. So why bother to create your own personal portal?
Perhaps there is no need. Nevertheless, this tutorial will argue that the cost of constructing, organizing, and maintaining a personal portal for keeping and re-finding web resources can be worth it when considering the following:
- Individuals can form habits that reduce the time it takes to accomplish a task.
- The otherwise clerical acts involved in organizing and maintaining information resources can become self-reflective acts that may actually contribute to an individual's successful interaction with information resources.
- It's easy to learn HTML and other tools of web resource creation and there are many free or low-cost resources to enable individuals to do that.
- The creation of web resources and tools can be a satisfying craft just like crotcheting, knitting, carpentry or writing.
People can interact with information behind the interface. Personalization and customization can be done by users. Well, in fact, there are many opportunities for users to do just that. See how you can customize your Google toolbar. If you want to tinker behind the scenes further, see UW Professor Terry Brooks' GreaseMonkey scripts. Yes, there are many resources and opportunities already out there for personalizing and customizing our interaction with information resources on the Web. A personal portal will be just one of them but one that might work well for your particular needs.