I was having a conversation with one of our main tech people on campus and we were talking about the way in which media, information and software are becoming increasingly disaggregated. Rather than having software on your machine and files stored in subdirectories, more and more stuff is moving online and being sorted by tags.
Ironically, the one hold-out has been the traditional homepage, where people learned to use HTML or set up their own sites at a site for free or charge. A decade ago faculty building their own homepages was cutting edge. Now they are a burden to maintain, and you find fewer people willing to maintain them.
At the same time you have the counter-example of something like Myspace, which gives people a place to upload material, build links and connect to one another, but seems unsuitable for more professional use.
One potential solution is Google Pages or Microsoft's Office Live.
This might work well, allowing one to build a stripped-down and easy to maintain home page which they can then link out to a blog, photo and data storage site, Delicious links, and any other online presence one might have.
If you have tried these (or use an alternative solution), let me know.
