Two big portal plays recently: Scirus Topic pages and Google Knols. I don’t know if this is related to the recent Wikipedia infighting brouhaha, but it’s certainly timely. Wikipedia is great for what it is, but we do need something that takes identity and authority into account.

Of course, no one’s calling these new efforts portals, because that would be way too 1.0, but it’s what they are. A single comprehensive destination site, just like Facebook et. al are portals. One single place to go for people to whom the open web is too big and scary. There’s something to be said for that, as it allows the identity and authority that wikipedia and the web as a whole don’t have, but readers of this blog will know that I’m a fan of decentralization and distribution. My blog is where I create content, and the nexus of my social network. Of course, because the web is open, it automatically includes all these closed efforts, and ideally, will interlink them.