We’re a Feisty Portal

Hey, OK, just don’t say that to my face, man….

First of all, we (scienceblogs.com) are/is not a portal. Second, we’re not Feisty. We’re Edgy. But this is what The Times On Line says about us:

This feisty portal hosts a 75-strong army of witty and qualified practitioners fighting at the front line of idiocy, bigotry and ignorance to achieve a science-savvy citizenry. Targets include assorted “utterly wrong” mainstream pundits.

Witty? Qualified? HAHAHAHAHA!

Well, OK, at least we got on the list. The list of the Best 100 blogs evah!

Read all about it here.

Comments

#1 Stacy
February 22, 2009

Congrats!:-)
#2 Lilian Nattel
February 22, 2009

Congrats!!!! You all deserve it.
#3 Cuttlefish
February 22, 2009

Hmph. They misspelled mine.

I can see getting a letter or two wrong, but every single one?

Inexcusable.
#4 Arikia
February 22, 2009

How is Sb not a portal? That’s what I always referred to the home page as at least. As in “I manage a web portal that connects a network of science blogs.” What would you call it? Email me back if you want because I probably won’t see the follow-up. Busy busy busy
#5 Greg Laden
February 22, 2009

I thought a portal was something different. A portal is a web page/site that a person uses to filter out some subset of the intertubes, and it is usually customized, and/or to give access to a selected set of web resources, sometimes with a common passpword access being handled by the portal. I have a portal here at UMN called “UPortal” (everthing here is either UThis or UThat or a gopher). My own portal is customized, requires my ID and password to get onto, but once I’m there I’m past all the other passwords for my course websites, library access, email, etc.

But I could be wrong.

But Wikipedia kinda agrees with me:

A web portal presents information from diverse sources in a unified way. Apart from the search engine standard, web portals offer other services such as e-mail, news, stock prices, infotainment, and other features. Portals provide a way for enterprises to provide a consistent look and feel with access control and procedures for multiple applications, which otherwise would have been different entities altogether. An example of a web portal is MSN or Google.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_portal
#6 Arikia
February 23, 2009

I think both things can be. I had the umich web portal in college. But Sb functions as a portal to meet most of the criteria you named. It presents info from diverse sources in a unified way — you bloggers are all different but have your blogs on a standard template, consistent look and feel etc.. even though you can use custom CSS if you want. There is also @Sb email, news via the home page and infotainment — just look at Jesus Frog! NE way, broad definition I suppose.
#7 Greg Laden
February 23, 2009

I think you are right. The 24 hour page, the “home” or “main” page, and 3.14 together are very much a portal, along with the other items you mention. I don’t think it even stretches the definition of portal to think of it this way.

It’s just that as an individual blogger I never saw it from this perspective, and I certainly don’t think of my blog as a portal. But I’m like an ant on a picnic table, what do I know?

QuicheMoraine.com … now THAT’s a portal!