From the very earliest days of the web, browsers had something called a ‘home page’. This was the default web page that would come up when you’d launch your browser and connect to the net.
Most people never change their home pages; they use whatever they were given. This could be the home page of their employer, or their Internet Service Provider, or even the home page of the browser itself.
In many unions, staff were given computers with the union’s website installed as the browser home page (even if that website rarely changed). And my guess is that most union staff would barely glance at the home page and quickly move on, using their bookmarks and Google to get around the web to more useful sites.
And yet the idea of a home page remains a potent one.

I have a home page, which I customised, and which now includes about a dozen small boxes. One is today’s weather for London. Another box includes top news stories from the BBC. There’s a box with my most frequently called phone numbers, a short to-do list, a large clock, and a calculator. And there’s the latest news from the trade union movement, from LabourStart (of course).
To create such a customised home page, one which includes the things I want to see when I look at my computer in the morning, I used a tool called Netvibes (http://www.netvibes.com).
Netvibes had five million users by last summer and is still growing. It was hailed last week by The Economist as being one of the very few examples of a major new web innovation coming from France.
And it’s not alone – competitors for individually-crafted personal home pages include Google’s homepage (http://www.google.com/ig), Microsoft’s Windows Live (http://www.live.com/), PageFlakes (http://www.pageflakes.com/),Webwag (http://www.webwag.com) and the very attractive Yourminis (http://www.yourminis.com/).
Unions can make use of these services in two ways. First they can encourage staff and activists to move away from the default home pages they already have on their computers and instead to use these flexible, powerful pages. And they can also ensure that union news is available in RSS feeds which are easily integrated into the pages.
Second, many of these new services allow unions to publish those news feeds in ways to make them more easily available to others. Netvibes, for example, allows you to publish a newsfeed to its ‘ecosystem’. This is a great way to share union news among others.
Customised home pages are not new. Back in the 1990s, search engines like Yahoo pioneered personalized home pages. But new technologies known collectively as Web 2.0 have made it easier than ever before to create a home page that really does give you — in an instant — the information you need to start your day on the web.