[Phil Wolff in a comment] Plumtree and others defined the intranet portal. Maybe [Radio] starts moving that portal to the desktop.
This is exactly what I meant. While corporate portals tend to centralize information and to create the need for some kind of editorial process, using tools like Radio lets users not only produce but also decide how to aggregate contents on their own desktops. This make the whole system highly scalable and lets users have a very high degree of customization in terms of how and when the access their information. I'm not saying that corporate portals are dead, I believe that there's a need for a set of centralized resources and contents. Applications like scheduling, document distribution, manuals, instructions, and similar still belong to a central server. Everything that does not need to be distributed to every single users of an Intranet can be decentralized. At the end of the last century we all believed that portals needed personalized GUIs and we were developing them on servers instead of where they belong: clients. Radio and applications like Radio are the ultimate GUI customization tool. I can decide how I access my contents because the interface is actually sitting on my own desktop, I don't need to change anything on the server, I can build the tools (or use others' tools) to decide how I want to interact with all these contents. Of course, given this approach, news aggregators as we know them today will need to evolve, but a journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step, and this is definetly the first very important step. [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]
