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Portal Wannabe
Unison - The Sound Of One Hand Clapping
2000 Hrs 27 February 2000
When the pompously titled Regional Media Bureau of Ireland, with a totally forgettable domain name (rmbi.ie), started out, it had intended to put the regional newspapers of Ireland on the web. Many of them had websites. This operation was eager to build a portal on other peopleīs content. However to anyone with a knowledge of regional newspaper publishing, it was clear that these guys hadnīt a clue. The main reason that people buy local newspapers is for the adverts first and then the local news. The RMBI sites seemed to have very few adverts of local relevance and the news was, in some cases, a month or so out of date. The webdesign was competent though.
When Internet-Ireland, of which RMBI was apparently a subset, was sold to the Independent Group, some of the newspapers werenīt too keen on having their content being used to bolster yet another poor attempt at a portal, especially one owned by the Independent group.
When one paper, the Kilkenny People, with a site that had at least 7K impressions per week tried to move, things got nasty. The Kilkenny People is one of a number titles that have withdrawn from the Unison site. It is expected that The Clonmel Nationalist, the Tipperary Star will also appear on their own URLs again in the next week or so. Interestingly many of the Newspapers that originally were going to be on the RMBI site have disappeared from the new Unison site. The Waterford News And Star was one notable omission. It had been on the RMBI site but apparently has not been included in the Unison site. Other papers, such as the Munster Express, were billed as "coming soon" however there seemed to be little intent on the part of the newspaper owners to join RMBIīs little plan.
Strange Events Dog Kilkenny People Transition
Strange and coincidental events dogged the Kilkenny Peopleīs transition from the depths of the Unison portal. The kilkennypeople.ie domain was initially hosted on Internet Irelandīs DNSes. The IEDR were notified of the change in control and DNS and implemented these changes promptly. However the DNSes at Internet Ireland are still showing the old DNS record and incorrectly directing all kilkennypeople.ie traffic to the Unison servers. The result of this dubious action has been to effectively cripple both the Kilkenny Peopleīs e-mail and web services. It is not known if the continuing inclusion of the Kilkenny Peopleīs domain records in the Internet Ireland DNSes is due to incompetence on the part of Internet Ireland/Unison or an oversight. In either case, it is resulting in DNS pollution and potential lack of business for the Kilkenny People. The DNSes on the other Irish sites continue to question the Internet Ireland servers and the Kilkenny People site loses traffic.
Why Unison Is A Poor Design
The Unison attempt at a portal is executed by people who seem to have no understanding of newspaper publishing or portal design. Portal sites are very different to the ordinary static websites. They have to be largely database backed. This task of designing a database backed website is a very complex one. It also requires that the software and hardware backing the site are sufficient to cope with the kind of very heavy traffic that a portal site will get. Ideally such a site will be backed by a commercial database such as Oracle. Vignette StoryServer and the ArsDigita Community Server are excellent examples of portal software solutions. However Unisonīs approach appears to be one step above a hobbyist solution. It uses PHP3 to generate content and pages on the fly. Oracle and portal expertise is expensive. Given the slowly changing nature of the news that Unison provides, a combination of static webpages and dynamic webpages would be more suited. To paraphrase a quote from the movie "Goodfellas", it may well fold under questioning.
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