Media: Portals Revisited at Tangentium

"Permeable Portals: Designing congenial web sites for the e-society" by Richard Coyne, John Lee and Martin Parker, was originally a paper at the 2004 IADIS conference on the e-society, held in Ávila, Spain, in July 2004, and has now been made available on the Web at Tangentium (linked below).

Coyne et al turn to the nature of the Web portal and its design, starting from the assumption that there is a conflict between the freedoms suggested by the Web and the apparent need for access restrictions. Their response is to look at ways of managing access to websites in ways that are more subtle, more flexible and more creative than slapping password protection on them.

'But what if we have a multiplicity, an over-indulgence, a surfeit, of portals?' they ask. 'As we have already hinted, the web can be thought not only as a series of spaces into which one gains access via a special site or link, but as a surfeit of interconnected links. This is not just to give priority to links rather than nodes, but to acknowledge the place of the web as a matrix of entrances and exits, a profusion of links, with the content of a page as an ever-receding and transient moment in the relentless quest for information.'

This is not a piece of research that drops a series of statistics in your lap, or hands over a guideline or two. Instead, it's a piece to think about away from the desktop. They conclude that 'encouraging and observing active usage over time emerges as a strategy for maintaining web security in low risk domains'.

Associated Link: Tangentium: Permeable Portals

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