Portals in space

People pushed these affinity Web sites for a long time, and without a whole lot of success. Why will this be different?
There are, in fact, a number of affinity portals that are extremely successful. But this is less like affinity marketing and more like syndication. Think of ManyOne like NBC with a number of affiliates who take the central stream and add to it. We're in syndication. It's a classic two-tier distribution system, like cars and books and VCRs. By intermediating, we drastically cut the cost of member acquisitions. We can take the cost of marketing to the floor. And that's money we're taking out of Super Bowl advertising and dropping CD-ROMs from the sky and channelling it into the very partners who are not only our distribution partners but also our content partners.

But you still have to market yourself.
That is 100 percent right on the money. The question is making the ManyOne logo be a Good Housekeeping seal of approval. Already, we've been doing partner development, and we have not been turned down once to date. We have got to have the pull-through from users who say, "I love this stuff. It's ad-free and it's supporting an organisation that I care about."

The final point is that ManyOne itself is in the process of becoming owned by a foundation. This lets us assure our partner network, who do not want to partner with AOL or Microsoft, that we're in this for the long haul. That we're building something that will never go public, can never be bought and whose board of directors includes some pretty incredible people, including Jane Goodall, Maurice Strong and Paul Hawken.

You've written that your partners will be "socially responsible" organisations. Who's going to count as socially responsible?
It's not a very weighty term in that regard. ManyOne invites its partners to consider endorsing the Earth Charter. But we will partner across the board with commercial and noncommercial organisations, so long as they're not antithetical to our values.

Does that include the NRA (National Rifle Association)? OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries)?
In general, that will be something for the foundation's board of directors to arbitrate. But the NRA is a classic example of an organisation that will have to be approached proactively on our part. They're already in our navigation taxonomy.

There are partnership and stewardship partners. Partners can be anybody, as long as they're not the American Nazi movement. That's why we have a board to arbitrate those extreme boundary cases. These navigation portals -- we give by invitation the editorial responsibility to one or more generally nonprofit institutions capable of polishing the lens to look through to that area of expertise. Today you have 100 minimum-wage workers at Yahoo. For the NRA? There's going to be a gun-rights advocacy portal. And a gun-control panel. There will be no thing absent from the ManyOne navigation.

Pornography?
Even pornography. We will have a pornography branch on our taxonomy. You can prune it, if you're an educator or a parent. The taxonomy is not intended to be an exclusionary zone. We only prune it where we broach the level of legality. If you wanted to build an editorial board for the Web, it would have to have thousands of institutions simultaneously doing it. That's what we've created a system to create.

The evidence is in to show that people gravitate toward search rather than directory -- and yet you're putting this massive editorial effort into what is essentially a directory with a 3D interface. Second, isn't what you're doing replicating what people are already doing with blogs, that is, having individuals maintaining expert portals of their own?
Not really, because although blogs are doing that, what we're doing is providing an organisational paradigm for it. And the best bloggers would be stewards of portals.

As for your first question, why was there a move toward search in the first place? The number one reason is that the directories suck. They're awful. If you ever try to do anything on Yahoo, you see that it's better than any group out there -- but that tells you how bad the environment is.

Let's stretch this out to three years from now. Ten to 300 of the major stewards are out there. Then do a search on ManyOne. The results are not going to be ranked by Google, but by the personal decisions of the best minds in the business. When someone types in "general relativity," there are the links someone should get first. The others, which rank equally high on Google, are garbage because they're pseudoscience.

This is starting to sound like a combination of About.com and Ask Jeeves.
This is Ask Jeeves done right, the stewardship model -- it underwhelms it to compare it that way, but done right in terms of letting the brightest people, the most experienced, to build the question-and-answer lenses used by search engines, to prioritize links, to build the contexts, to build these domains.

Being an ISP is a rough business.
It's bloody horrible.

And with broadband it's even worse. There are no margins there.
I do not want to be in the bandwidth-providing business. And we are not. We have on the back end the ability to marry our portal and subscriber business to anybody who wishes to supply the services. We're not interested in buying up modem farms. We'll always be outsourcing that. But we can afford to do this because if you look at the budget, there's a marketing and customer acquisition budget, and we've changed who that goes to.

You refer to your new portal sometimes as the "visual Web." How will the blind and visually impaired navigate it?
One of the things that's nice about our navigation system is that it is positively dripping with semantic meaning. So, for example, if a blind individual were to come up to a future version of this, he could say, "Computer, tell me what is in the solar system," and the computer is going to know how to respond to that. Try asking Google that. You could say: "Take me to Earth and tell me what's in Earth by this semantic mapping of a navigation system." I think speech-based has potential -- we haven't even thought about how far that could go...I think it's very rich in potential in that regard.

You've cast your lot with the Mozilla browser just as AOL is withdrawing its support for its development group. Are you at all apprehensive about the future of that software?
We are going to have a new open-source browser integrating the premier X3D rendering system on the Web. Frankly, it is just fine with me about AOL. The more foolish AOL is in casting off the Mozilla group, fine. We are convinced that an open-source browser is the future of the Web, and market share issues are not telling the long-term story of what's going to happen. I think Mozilla getting out of AOL and into the foundation is a wonderful move.

When should we expect to see your browser and service launch?
We're in the second, hopefully final, beta between 2 and 3 weeks from now, and then we'll launch whenever it's ready. My guess is sometime in September. And then I predict that ManyOne will do for the Internet what the Mac and Windows did for MS-DOS.