Personalisation & homepages

Like many I've been excited by how personalisation has been developing, and am a keen user of iGoogle amongst others. I was therefore glad to see that the BBC has taken on a similar idea on it's homepage, and have been promoting it to colleagues shamelessly. But It's got me thinking. I've been thinking of it from a portal point of view, but is the BBC really a portal?

One of my other lines that I'm always on about is how unimportant your homepage is. Sure it's important, but is it as important as you think it is? I often have to use stats to show that chances are your homepage is only responsible for maybe a fifth of your site entrances, as chances are that they are only using it to get somewhere else - they're not interested in it per se.

The BBC homepage is apparently getting a third of the 20 million visits per week that BBC sites get, but who is really using it as a hompeage except the BBC themselves? I realised that amongst all the hype that I was partly responsible for generating I never use the BBC homepage myself, only ever use it to get somewhere else, and love the concept but only so that I can bring it to use elsewhere.

I think I've got a bit overtaken by enthusiasm here ...