One of the most popular questions on Lockergnome asks members what they use for a home page. This thread has been active for a few months now. That itself is impressive: most questions die out after only a few hours. The overwhelming consensus is that people are using Google for their home page. This actually shocked me a bit. Sure, Google is becoming a verb instead of a website. It’s all-powerful in the minds of some people. But is this really what you need to see every single time you fire up a browser page?

I have nothing against the popular search engine. I happen to use it myself! However, I can think of many other sites which should hold that golden place of honor on my desktop. You may argue that you can find everything in an instant with Google. Yup, that’s true! You can click inside the handy little search box most browsers provide to do that search, though. Why would you need it as your home page?

What is the first thing you see when you fire up your browser du jour? What made you choose that particular site?

• What has your Android experience been like?
• You are NOT your technology.
• Has Apple made a huge mistake?
• Can you make your own cleaner for granite counter tops?
• If you read it on the Internet then it must be true – right?
• Do you feel Apple should change the name of the iTunes application?
• Is Amazon trying to beat out Apple with their dollar rentals?
• Where do you want to go?
• Only a true geek would use his vacation time to visit Microsoft headquarters.
• What are the best methods of storing data?
• China’s monopoly on 17 key elements sets the stage for a supply crisis.
• Is Netflix like The Little Engine That Could?
• Does knowledge of a new fact change the knowledge of something you knew already?
• How does the human body get rid of things it no longer needs?
• Text messages reveal the emotional timeline of September 11.
• IBM is taking the top spot – again.
• Are there any affordable web hosts out there who offer decent services and uptime?
• Is there much of a difference between distilled water and spring water?
• A person’s capacity for exercise can be inherited.
• What type of device do you use to stream video?
• What does Apple have against touch screens?
• Does Apple purposely slow down programs they create for Windows?
• Snoop Dogg is shilling for Symantec? What is the world coming to?
• Home audio sales are on the rise.
• What elements make for the perfect tweetup?
• What conferences have you attended… and which would you pay to go to again?
• The pace at which Google is releasing major revision numbers of its browser is staggering.

If I had my way, all of you would set our software site as your home page. You can find all of the apps and software you need there – at the best of prices. Why would you need anything else?

What is the Home Page in Your Browser?

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When you open up your Web browser, what is your home page set as? I know that many of you will answer Google or Yahoo. Some of you may be using a site like Facebook or MySpace as your main page. Mine is often just blank (on purpose), but when I do use one, it’s the Mac page on Alltop. This is a Website that launched a few months ago, and is largely funded by our friend Guy Kawasaki.

The idea behind Alltop is to really aggregate top resources and collections of information into a consice format, and target it to a specific audience. My homepage is set to the Mac section, as I mentioned. Just guess what’s on there? There’s links to Mac news, Mac Websites, and even Mac programs. It’s a great way to get the latest news from several places at once. If you hover your mouse over one of the story links, you’ll get a small preview box with the beginning of the article in it.

When Guy first started talking about this, there were some naysayers. They didn’t see the point of it. However, I think it’s great. I like it so much, it’s my home page. What else is there to say? I haven’t had any issues or problems with it whatsoever. They’ve done an excellent job with it so far. They’re constantly launching new ‘divisions’ of the site, such as the Mac page I use.

We help you explore your passions by collecting stories about “all the topics” on the web. We’ve grouped these collections — “aggregations” — into individual Alltop sites based on topics such as environment, photography, science, Muslim, celebrity gossip, military, fashion, gaming, sports, politics, automobiles, and Macintosh. At each Alltop site, we display the headlines of the latest stories from dozens of sites and blogs.

You can think of an Alltop site as a “digital magazine rack” of the Internet. To be clear, Alltop sites are starting points—they are not destinations per se. The bottom line is that we are trying to enhance your online reading by both displaying stories from the sites that you’re already visiting and helping you discover sites that you didn’t know existed. In other words, our goal is the “cessation of Internet stagnation” by providing “aggregation without aggravation.”

So what’s your home page? Why did you choose that one?

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What is Your Home Page?

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My first home page on the web was through my college. There wasn’t much you could do with a home page back then. In order to digitize photos, you had to actually scan them. No one I knew had a digital camera back then. But, I’ve been building Web pages since the mid-1990s. Even though I’m not Expert at building them, I do have a good idea of what works, and of upcoming trends.


I was reading my feeds the other night, and saw an article written by an old friend of mine, Jeffrey Zeldman. If you’re into any kind of Web design, then you know who he is. His article on April 27th, called The Vanishing Personal Site. I want to share the beginning of this article with you:

Our personal sites, once our primary points of online presence, are becoming sock drawers for displaced first-person content. We are witnessing the disappearance of the all-in-one, carefully designed personal site containing professional information, links, and brief bursts of frequently updated content to which others respond via comments. Did I say we are witnessing the traditional personal site’s disappearance? That is inaccurate. We are the ones making our own sites disappear.

This is a change that I’ve been recognizing and have talked about in the past. When I mention that “brand is becoming increasingly decentralized”, this is what I mean. In my new blog theme, I have a Social Me area, where I link off to other places where you can find me on the Web. That is more important to me, than to you… the people who follow me. I want to archive what I’m doing, what people are saying, and what’s going on in the world around me. This is a great way to archive all of my user-generated content.


As you begin to create more videos, more audio and more text… if you’re not keeping track of your own content somehow, you are not doing yourself any favors. It’s great to have accounts on many different places. But if you cannot at least direct people back to you somehow, by having your own personal space to keep track of it all… you’re potentially losing yourself and your identity.

Registering and hosting a Website these days is easy, and inexpensive. Heck, you can register a site using GoDaddy, and use coupon code Chris1 to save 10%. I use WebAir for my hosting. You can get some good pricing by using my name, as well.


I think that yes, the personal site is vanishing. It doesn’t have to, though. If you’re using a theme or structure that allows you to aggregate all of your social places. This is why I did this for myself… and all of you. Now people will be able to easily find you, and everything will be aggregated into one point.

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Are Personal Home Pages and Blogs Dying?