> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Barry Lee Brisco
> Sent: Wednesday, January 20, 1999 7:16 PM
> ... The portals I've seen have a few news headlines and some other
> stuff, but so what? That's hardly a useful presentation of the news,
> TV schedules are different regionally as is the weather.
I have a feeling you haven't seen any of the leading-edge portals.
Excite, for instance, lets me choose from a hundred or more categories
of news, choose the nearest city/airport for my weather report, list
stocks I want to watch (and the number of shares I own; it calculates
the profit/loss of changes. GTE gave me a $100K day yesterday).
I can choose TV listings for local, DBS, and Jones Cable channels
to make up the exact set that can be displayed on our TVs.
>I much prefer a dedicated news site with an opening page that
> shows me much more news,
As I said, Excite at least can give you huge amounts. It doesn't do
things like let me specify filters to reject any story containing the
word "Monica", assign priorities to determine display order, or let
me search sources like New Scientist, but it may well do all this and
more someday. However, I can do it now by writing CGI.
> a bookmarked weather page that shows me the
> weather over my head, etc.
Well, my new roof-top weather station will do that (wind speed and
direction, temp, humidity, pressure, rainfall rate, light intensity).
Excite forces me to choose either Manassas or Dulles for the official
weather report, both about 10 miles away. It also gives me sun and
moon rise and set given my latitude and longitude, but I don't know
how accurately it does the calculations.
The things that portals do are a very good idea, but doing them as
mini-AOLs is a bad approach. Unfortunately, it may be somewhat
unavoidable. My CGI routines filter out the ads that the companies
that provide the content rely upon to pay their costs. If everyone
could do this, the content might cease to be available.
Bob Munck
Mill Creek Systems LC
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