E-Commerce News and social shopping “portals”
The E-Commerce Times just published a very good piece titled "Portals in a E-Commerce 2.0 world".
I really liked the first quote 
"Social shopping sites are definitely already more semantic than
general Web 2.0 sites," Wishpot CEO Max Ciccotosto told the E-Commerce
Times. "They do a lot of interesting things with the concept of
‘product;’ they are able to scrape for this info, parse it, etc. They
are filtered gateways."
One interesting point that came to mind when reading the article is that Ned - the author - referred to us and other social shopping players as "portal". That’s something that we had not been called before.
I can definitely see why Ned is referring to social shopping as "portals", but at the same time there is a key difference from a "traditional" portal.
Portals were (and are) designed to provide a filtered view to users. Such sites (think MSN, Yahoo, etc…) employee people that decide what gets presented to users. The goal is to provide information that is interesting and useful, at the same time saving a LOT of time to readers.
If you think about what we do at Wishpot than you can definitely see that we are providing a "filtered" view for our users. An example is our "Most Wanted" page. But a KEY difference is that we do not employee anybody to pick what gets into the page. Instead we have algorithms that aggregate the picks of our users and display them as needed in the different sections of the site.
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