Cool tool? Or menace? Both! I'm not sure whether to be frightened or delighted, but I just checked out OnePage and was very impressed. OnePage debuted at PC Forum in March. I believe I wrote something about them at the time, but I didn't find the concept terribly interesting -- not enough to go to their actual presentation there or to check them out since. I had basically forgotten about them until last week, when Meg and I stopped by to see David at Moreover, who raved about the service. The concept, of course, is they take all the information you want to track across the web and aggregate it all on one page. (Get it?) But wait -- it's not just another customized news/weather/stocks portal thingy. You can grab info from pretty much *any* web site -- blogs being perfect candidates. To give you an idea, here is a screenshot of a OnePage page I put together with all the Pyrates blogs, plus the top-ten freshest blogs list from Blogger. That took about five minutes to put together, as a new user. It's nicely done.
From the publisher's perspective, of course, is where this may be scary -- or, at least, annoying. The idea that people can take your content or just part of your content and view it out of the context of your site, your design, and even the rest of the page it was originally published in is likely to not go over well with a lot of web publishers. Especially those who take pride in their design and those who's content supports a business relying on banner ads or other content-surrouding stuff. Fortunately, it should be relatively easy (if annoying) to block requests from OnePage, for those who have the server-side programming abilities. The other way to go would be to design a version specifically for OnePage, which could overcome a lot of these drawbacks. I'm not sure what all that would mean, but you'll notice in the screenshot that, for example, onfocus, because he uses inline <font> tags, retains pb's nice formatting, while evhead™, because it relies on CSS for formatting, is completely munged. Not that OnePage yet seems to be setting the world on fire enough to justify coding for it, but I could see it becoming a very popular way to read blogs.
From the publisher's perspective, of course, is where this may be scary -- or, at least, annoying. The idea that people can take your content or just part of your content and view it out of the context of your site, your design, and even the rest of the page it was originally published in is likely to not go over well with a lot of web publishers. Especially those who take pride in their design and those who's content supports a business relying on banner ads or other content-surrouding stuff. Fortunately, it should be relatively easy (if annoying) to block requests from OnePage, for those who have the server-side programming abilities. The other way to go would be to design a version specifically for OnePage, which could overcome a lot of these drawbacks. I'm not sure what all that would mean, but you'll notice in the screenshot that, for example, onfocus, because he uses inline <font> tags, retains pb's nice formatting, while evhead™, because it relies on CSS for formatting, is completely munged. Not that OnePage yet seems to be setting the world on fire enough to justify coding for it, but I could see it becoming a very popular way to read blogs.