ManyOne Launches "Topic Centric" Portal Network

ManyOne’s mission is to provide the platform and business infrastructure enabling values-conscious people and organizations to connect, collaborate, and create “trusted portal networks,” with the shared system governed by policies set by world-renowned experts and honored civic leaders.

Overview

ManyOne is building a world-class collaborative authoring, publishing and presentation platform, which provides information to organizations and individuals in a socially responsible manner.

ManyOne’s goal is the creation and operation of portal networks. While the portal networks compete with established portal networks and products, several key differences translate into a significant advantage. This advantage includes first-class collaborative authoring, publishing, viewing and administration tools, as well as a unique governance structure that opens doors to civil society partners. A focus on topics (rather than people) as the primary portal themes provides for more compelling and enduring “anchors” in the network.

First-class authoring, collaborative publishing, viewing and administration functionality

While the lion’s share of recent attention has been on networks (such as MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn) that emphasize “Social Networking” functionality, the ManyOne offering focuses on world-class publishing and viewing functionality. Though the ManyOne offering will also include social networking functionality, this functionality is designed to support the publishing and viewing functionality as well as catalyze the build out of portal networks and encyclopedias.

Governance and ownership structure

ManyOne’s unique governance and ownership structure enables it to establish a unique position of trust among values-conscious people and organizations. Examples include the world of experts, educators, students, artists, writers, musicians, activists, public servants and the organizations in which they work. They represent the core of the market that ManyOne will serve. In addition, market trends show all age groups are increasingly turning their interests into action. As this trend manifests online, people are looking for a trusted community as their vehicle for engagement and action. ManyOne intends to provide that vehicle.

The range of “networks” that the ManyOne platform will serve includes: quality, expert-created Encyclopedias on one end of the spectrum, Personal Portals on the other end, and Community Portals in between. This association with trusted, high-quality content and people — in conjunction with the cross-fertilization and overall integration afforded by the common Portal Services platform — is an important differentiator on the Web today.

The “Topic-Centric” Network and Ecosystem

ManyOne is building a new class of portal/social network, one whose content can be organized (topically, geographically, organizationally, etc.) along various metadata lines instead of between people (as MySpace, etc. does):

The advantages of the  "Topic Centric" Portal Network are as follows:

1. Topics, geography and organizations are more persistent and stable points of interest, thus communities are more durable and more resistant to poaching.
2. Communities that form around topics, geography and organizations are generally much larger than those that form around people. These communities are able to become true “centers of gravity” on the Web, unlike personal networks.
3. Users interested in specific topics are more valuable to advertisers (reaching them through free personal portals)
4. People can be topics too. Hence, there’s no inherent downside to topic-centricity of the network.

Establishing a credible “Topic-Centric” network model depends crucially on recruiting the world’s top experts to seed and approve the content that serves as the nodes of the network. These experts prefer to deliver their work through vehicles dedicated to the core ethos they hold, namely service to the public. In addition, organizing the expert community takes hard work and time. These facts, in combination with ownership/governance structure of ManyOne and the non-profit governed and expert-reviewed portals coming online, gives ManyOne a unique opportunity to establish a topic- and organization-centric network of networks.