The best links from the major portal sites to the Mac universe come not from the traditional portals but from the ones who eschew the sexier services; concentrating instead on their directories, partnerships and alliances. And even they don't do a good job because you have to dig down through the hierarchy of categories to get to the popular Mac related sites.

Well, you don't go driving down the street and turn on your radio to the Chrysler channel, but there's a difference between a car and a computer. Unlike a car, a computer needs an operating system and software before it can be "driven" anywhere. And if a computer has a shorter life span than a car, the operating system and software has an even shorter one. In a couple of years we have gone through an OS8 CD, 8.1 update, OS8.5 , 8.5.1 update, 8.6 update, and we are now on to OS9 with OSX around the corner. And many applications, in particular shareware, get updated even more frequently.

So if a Mac user wants to stay current, he needs access to news of his platform, OS and software. And that is the kind of news you won't find in the top hierarchy of portal news pages.

As a consequence, many of us use our own bookmarks to access our preferred Mac sites, or use specialist sites as a portal for Mac topics. There could be a number of reasons for this. If the boys from Redmond had their way, Wintel-centric sites would be plastered with links to the Redmond company and its browser (and some do). But that is not the case with all portals. Where partnerships and alliances with technology reporting companies are few in number, you will only get the computing news from those partners. ZDNet is an example of a ubiquitous source.

Even in Yahoo's personalized pages, the software updates module is next to useless for a savvy Mac surfer. This is unsatisfactory. (Ok, sorry, I meant to say "sucks"). Rather than serving a default Horoscope module as most portals do in a personalized page (I'll restrain from commenting on that… mmpffgguhh) they should include an "OS or Computer" module. They can tell what computer and browser we used to surf in. How else would the nastier Wintel sites know when to turn off some features like voting and video streaming? If 75% of the readership surf into a portal site riding on the Wintel platform, it shouldn't follow that 75% of platform related news should be Wintel-centric. Mac users would prefer to receive 75% of platform related news that is relevant to OUR platform.

If you customize your sports module in a portal to emphasize NFL scores, then that is precisely what you should get, including the ability to turn off NCAA scores if you don't follow that, or whatever else. This feature is not fully exploited when it comes to computer related news. And that's where the portals are missing out on an opportunity. Because we use them for what we need them for, but go elsewhere for our platform related news. And it works fine for us, but that is not the point. The point is by not making alliances of some sort with the sites we are interested in, everyone misses out on some traffic and revenues.

I am presuming that Mac-centric sites are not that arrogant that they believe they are getting all the traffic that they are targeting. They are not; even if some are getting more traffic than they can cope with. Traffic equals advertising revenues. If a portal is able to deliver substantial traffic to a commercial Mac site, or vice versa, then there should be some arrangement that makes linkage between them worthwhile in a business sense. It certainly benefits the lesser informed users of our platform to keep up with Mac related news, which translates to more revenue for software and peripheral manufacturers, which in turn translates to more advertising, as well as to a better computing experience for the user. All in all, a nice positive feedback loop.

I for one don't find myself missing out on Mac news because I am prepared to go and find it myself. It doesn't bother me personally that portals do such a lousy job for users of a minority platform or OS because I (and I hope you too) go elsewhere. Perhaps, though, in light of the recent clawback of Apple market share, it should start to bother them.

Henry Brimo publishes MacNewbie, a resource for Mac users.