Personal web portal

A WEB portal as all of us know is a web page that acts as an entry point to the Net. Would you like to transplant your web bookmarks to the Net and thereby weave your own personal portal site with links of your favourite sites organised in a meaningful manner? This week's column examines the pros and cons of the online bookmark storage services mushroomed recently.

Service need

Getting lost in the cyberspace without reaching the target site is a common risk faced by Net surfers. Once we come across an interesting site the chance of forgetting the link is rather high. To get around the problem, most of the web browsers have the bookmark feature. Using this facility one can store the web page in the list of favourite pages. So the web page can be accessed anytime one wants by just clicking the favourites button (bookmarks button for Netscape users) and traversing the favourites list. Slowly, over time, your list will grow and the favourite list will ultimately turn into an information asset for your business and personal needs. Apart from storing the links, one can organise it properly in any manner that is meaningful to him.

One problem with the storing and accessing sites this way is that the bookmarks will not be available when you browse using another computer. If you are travelling and want to visit a site the details of which are stored in the bookmark folder of your machine sitting at office/home, you are in trouble. Accessing your favourite site will naturally turn out to be an extremely time consuming and costly exercise.

Solution

One solution to this problem is to transfer the bookmark from your machine to the Internet. There are many services available that provide this service. One service that is free and easy to operate is backflip. Once you enlist their service and export your bookmark entries to their site, it creates a personal web site for you (almost like a Yahoo kind of interface). The service automatically analyses your bookmark and organises it into various categories for you.

How to use the service

Access the service at http://www.backflip.com, go through the sign up process and register your name with the service. Once the registration process is through, you can click at the Add Now button and the service will start copying your favourite links to the backflip site. Once the transfer process is over, you will be presented with a site with your favourite links organised under various categories. You have the liberty to re-organise this arrangement of your links. Once the page is established, you can view the page in either directory style or as an alphabetic list. You can introduce new categories by inserting new folders and thereby customise the page to suit your taste and liking.

Whenever you log on to the site by presenting your name and password, you will automatically be taken to your page, which by all means can be considered as your personal web portal. To make the addition of new pages more user friendly, the site has provided a tool - Backflipit! Button - which can be inserted into your browser tool bar quite effortlessly. By just clicking at the Backflipit! button, the service automatically grabs the web page link and files it in a proper folder. When you click at the button, a data-entry window opens up, where you can edit the page description and choose a folder to store it in.

To further make your web life comfortable, the service provides a search tool at your disposal, which can be used to locate the required site.

Other similar services

There are many more similar service providers available in the Net with which you can experiment on Blink (http://www.blink.com), and Clickmarks.com (http://www.clickmarks.com) are some of them.

Advantages

By making your bookmarks available online, the service lets you access your bookmarks anywhere, anytime and release you from the trouble of carrying the bookmark copy with you when you have to use another machine to browse.

Bookmark is quite valuable an asset for a savvy web user the loss of which he can ill afford. Since the bookmark is copied to the web, you will not lose it even if your personal storage device gets corrupted.

Most services provide a feature through which you can make some (or all if you want) of the favourite sites available to your friends/business associates (who are also members of the service).

Disadvantages

Major disadvantage is the site's potential to invade your privacy. By transferring your favourite pages to another site, you are also providing information regarding your interests and tastes. The service can definitely monitor your browsing habits and slowly capture your web navigation trajectory and pass on this information to other interested parties. Yes, we have the usual sweet rhetoric of "we will keep your private information confidential", but the truth is that the customer is at the risk of losing his privacy to some extent. But this becomes important only if you give too much importance to these matters and in a networked world you are bound to lose some of your private comforts - a price you give for your convenience!

J. Murali

(The author can be contacted at: murali27@satyam.net.in)

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