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It seems every other day I find out about a new tool to get me to the information that matters most. Back in the day, it was “My Yahoo”:http://my.yahoo.com, then it was “NetNewsWire”:http://ranchero.com/netnewswire, then for a while it was “Newsgator”:http://www.newsgator.com, then “Google Home”:http://www.google.com/ig, now “Rojo”:http://rojo.com. Just today I took “Windows Live”:http://www.live.com for a spin before deciding that I liked the much lighter “Microsoft Start”:http://www.start.com. Of the competition, Rojo still wins out (for now), but not because it’s a great product. I love the lightness and ease of use of Microsoft Start, but the portals haven’t quite caught up with the information model suitable for the attention economy.

Everybody loves the idea of a portal: one place, all your information. Get stock quotes, email, weather, global news, local news, website comments, blog entries, Flickr photos, product announcements, local movie times, whatever. Add to that my bank account balance (secure, of course, but we’ll leave those worms in the can for now), upcoming events from my calendar, and task lists and I might be a real happy camper — in charge of all the bits of information that I need to meet my goals for the day. But the problem is that this is all still a lot easier said than done. While the technology is here to tie most of this information together through RSS, portal designers *still* seem to repeat a cardinal sin of web applications, which is to engineer the technology first, and paint on the user interface after.

“These guys”:https://gettingreal.37signals.com/ will tell you that this is the exact *wrong* way to build an app, and I think poignantly so with one that’s intended to emulate a newspaper. With the advent of the information age, we’ve replaced hundreds of years of typography and graphic design insight, with this:

A tiny, constrictive, awkward little idiot box of information nobody wants to read. Spread out another 8 of these little boxes all over your screen in tic-tac-toe formation and, voilà, welcome back to 1999. To really make things horrifying, throw in some Microsoft-issue, 9-point Verdana typeface (will somebody _please_ tell these guys that Verdana is to the web what Times New Roman was to print five years ago?). Now you’ve got something that would send Edward Tufte to the grave just so he could spin in it.

Okay, okay, both Google’s and Microsoft’s custom homepages have been hailed as web 2.0 because of their Ajaxy drag-and-drop, redesign-on-the-fly features. But, really, how often are you supposed to be modifying your screen layout? 10% of the time? That leaves the other 90% of the time that you’re using the screen for it’s main function: _reading it_. The exact functionality that Google and Microsoft both seem to have spent the least amount of time perfecting. Bravo.

Think I’m overreacting? Go build yourself a Google or Microsoft or Yahoo dashboard and come back. Think you’ve got something you can live with? Now go look at “Veerle Pieters’ site redesign”:http://veerle.duoh.com/. You might have built a page that you might not mind looking at day in and day out, but you’re not going to find any tool today that will construct a site for you as compelling and interesting as Veerle’s site. And, remember, the portal is supposedly showing you information _that you care about_.

Well crafted dashboards need to be “designed to be read”:http://www.porsche.com/filestore.aspx/normal.jpg?pool=germany&type=galleryimage&id=d9af94b7-9c30-4ff2-a8c4-9401abf25d76&lang=none&filetype=normal, not to be “consumed”, and certainly not as an afterthought. In the transition from the information economy (“wow, look at all the cool stuff I can read”) to the attention economy (“*good Lord*, how do I get rid of all the noise?!”) design will mean the difference between making a successful web 2.0 app and being an also-ran.