Personal Homepage

David Brake asks on his weblog what a personal homepage is. In my taxonomy anything that is published on the Web and which offers a reading, listening or viewing experience, is in my opinion a Publishing TeleService. I still want another word for publishing as this a providers viewpoint and I want a usres viewpoint.

Nevertheless David opens another viewpoint, which started me wondering about possible subsets of my service category. It is clear that a personal hoempage can have more services than just a publishing service. Whether the webpage is maintained by an individual is not important, as that says nothing about the service that is offered. And whether the webpage offers information on the job (i.e. dentist) of the person, is not very interesting either. It is still the publication of information. Here you see mainly the purpose of the information, i.e. advertisement or curriculum vitae. I think that it will become more interesting if the information gets more formalized and formatted. For instance with the publication of a FOAF-file or a OpenReview, the publisher (person) gets into a enabling service. Such a FOAF-file or OpenReview might be used by other services. If also a human readible version is published I might call this a more specific publishing service. The essential point is that the purpose of the published information follows a standard format.

As you see I take a viewpoint opposite to David Brake. I use the users viewpoint to determine the category and not the providers’ viewpoint (maintainer, publisher). And that is the problem with the word Personal Homepage. It tells something of the provider and not much of the service.