I found a very nice site that acts as a hub for an extensive number of industries, detailing trade magazines, white papers, downloads and podcasts by sector. It is webified so is searchable by keyword and can allow you to consume updates as rss. I’m countint 23 industry sectors, ranging from Agriculture to Utility and Energy, including Life Sciences, Education, Healthcare and Finance.
So, the breadth of the curation is good, and there is a clear amount of energy being placed into it by the staff, but they fail to make some simple integrations that would make the resource Web 2.0. When you click through to a particular resource you are exported out to the host site (in at least the cases that I tested) where you are challenged by another information gathering process. Why not simply create a single profile and home it on the hub site, and push that information across to the next site as a roaming profile. There are plenty of to do this, e.g, openid, hCard, or there is the upcoming Windows 8 to act as a target for what a large percentage of the public should be able to leverage soon enough.
While I appreciate the efforts gone into by the hub, you can clearly see the tensions of each organization to get what they need out of the experience of the user accessing the site, namely, their marketing information. And while I’m certain that those marketing people need that data to sustain themselves, it is not user-centric in its approach. It adds clicks (keyboard as well as mouse!) making it onerous.
