The more a publisher's staff gets involved in improving the directory service, the more it improves over the product produced by the automated system. Community publishing concepts are the basis for building the online community guides that can be created with the InType technology. Restaurants, for example, can create fancy directory listings including everything about their businesses including menu items simply by filling out a Web form. Alki has a demonstration of that on a Web site called A Table in Seattle . Rinearson says he wants very much to see the newspaper industry embrace this concept.
Newspapers have great potentials to be portals.
Alki is not betting the farm on newspapers, however, as any number of industries could embrace its technology and become the Internet portal for their communities. He says he's not talking to telephone companies in the U.S. about this, but he is in discussions with them overseas, for example. His hope is to find a large newspaper chain to embrace the concept, rather than try to deploy it across the whole industry. He's not interested in doing 150 deals with newspapers. Perhaps most importantly, Rinearson believes that the newspaper industry should do this on its own.