I’m working on creating a financial news portal and have been thinking about the information architecture of portals. It seems portals like My Yahoo! are a sophisticated set of bookmarks: you pass through your portal into a set of selected documents.
I need to invent a new term, which I’ll call a shell until I think of something hipper, that is more of an intelligent intermediary, whatching where you go and making an effort to shape the context on each page according to your selections.