4.1 Your Opportunity to build your media Company

Over the past decade, the giddy pace of change in the computing and telecommunications world has been both exhilarating and exhausting. The speed, power, access, and reach provided by electronic tools enable and empower us, but keeping up with the latest technological innovations can be a daunting and enervating task for anybody.

Just when you thought it was safe to congratulate yourself on having gotten your web site up and running, you hear that something that goes under the deceptively benign label of "portal" is all the rage.

A portal is a web site designed to provide one-stop entry to a variety of Internet services and resources related to particular subject or industry. Intended as the user's starting point for each venture onto the web, its major attraction is easy access to information. Portals are not so much a technological phenomenon as a method of categorizing and organizing information for easy navigation. They are particularly beneficial for novice or timid web explorers.

While portals provide search tools, they are more than search engines. Among the services offered by some of the preeminent portals are free e-mail, chat rooms, instant messenger, free personal home pages, address books, maps/directions, news, directories or content channels, personalization, classified ads, calendars, shopping, specialty searches (for example, sites for children or special education teachers), and communities or clubs of people who share common interests.

A variation of the portal is the "vortal" or vert-port, or vertical portal, which provides information and services to a specific industry or interest group or about a particular subject matter. There are intranet (internal networks that limit access to authorized users) as well as Internet portals, which are generally open to the public.