I remember my first web site - it was purchased through a company that specialised in small web sites for technological illiterati like myself. For $1,000 a year I had a clunky but effricient cut-and-paste site that allowed me to publish documents, upload files and photos and generally put out there all the ravings an ramblings of my fevered imagination.
Then I saw my first web portal - a site that allowed me to all of the above, but I could also roam around on line and find other stuff on other web sites through my very own window to the web. It was the difference between on line publishing, and on line searching.
In the meantime, in my role as TALC I was asked to talk with the T&L industry about something that the entire T&L industry could use to find things - they wanted a kind of "yellow pages" on the web.
It was more than a web portal, because people also wanted to connect data and applications, share ideas and knowledge and generally do this with everyone around them. I learned that this was called a "many-to-many" system - as opposed to a "one-to-many" or a "B2B - business to business" system. The issues invovled in many-to-many connections are an order of complexity harder than one-to-many. Stay with me here, it gets worse as we go along!
It's like managing a complete open and chaotic marketplace of connections instead of a simple one direction channel of connections. All the numbers change. The ways people connect to each other are various - they use all different pieces of hardware and software, they are in different locations with differing ICT infrastructure.
The jargon for this kind of systems is a web "gateway" - a platform that is "content free" and serves only one purpose - to connect you to many people and for them to find you with a minimum of fuss and delay, and no "noise" from other areas e.g. Google gives you 17,000,000 "hits" when you type anything in - only the frirst 10 are usually relevant.
So here is how it goes (I think) - you use a web gateway to find your way to a web portal (or a web site) and then you search around for useful things - data and applications and using the web gateway you connect and share them. Web site = publication/a book; web portal = library/many books, web gateway = a marketplace of books.
Still no clearer? Sighhh. What can I say? Keep trying. Maybe your grandchildren will "get it".