woa – check out the beautiful friendly url’s on UPortal…
http://tinyurl.com/5uwr8k

Now I’d agree that

https://portal.bris.ac.uk/mybristol/tag.7ef20678c7572c37.render.userLayoutRootNode.uP?uP_root=root&uP_sparam=activeTab&activeTab=1

is a rather ‘uncool URI’. But I was more interested in the MyBristol portal service itself and, in particular, the portal toolbar which is available for the FireFox browser:

The Add Newsfeed option “allows you to maintain a personalised set of newsfeeds“.  Wouldn’t it be great if every institutions provided a service like this, which allowed your news feeds and your bookmarks to be stored in a managed environment – if it would also allow such data to be seamlessly stored on your preferred external service as well (perhaps del.icio.us or Diigo for your bookmarks and Google Reader or Netvibes for your news feeds).

I feel that the ability to store such resources on a remote service is needed in order to gain the ‘network effect’ that popular remote services can provide. But I’d also like to have a managed local copy, so I wouldn’t have to worry if the remote service went down, its performance was unreliable or if I was concerned about the privacy implications of storing sensitive information remotely. And I’d like such services to work transparently so I wouldn;t have to worry about managing plugins myself.

Are such approaches being developed?