Steve Rubel has a post this morning that describes ESPN’s new offering - myESPN.  He reviews the site very favorably and it certainly is an interesting example from a great media pioneer. 

However, more interesting is Steve’s comment:

I see a start page battle shaping up in the months ahead between the mainstream news outlets and the search portals. The stakes are high. These are going to be the places where people increasingly initiate their browsing. This means that the start page will become a critical funnel for advertising.

I believe he is correct - this is VERY important.  However, not ONLY because it is where people will initiate their browsing experience.  Also, because I believe this will ultimately become part of our ‘digital identities.’  You can tell a lot about some one by what they have as their start page & with the movement toward social media we will need to figure out an efficient & effective way to share this.  Don’t believe me … Think what you would know about someone based on the following start pages …

• Local News Site
• ESPN
• myWSJ
• Yahoo / Google
• Comcast.net (Ok - fine in this case just that you’re lazy or don’t know how to use a computer

I’m including this in my ‘attention’ posts because we need to capture this attention.  In many ways you could argue it is just implictly included in what you click on, purchase and search for.  However, I disagree.  Here are a few examples:

• If get highlights daily for the Cleveland Browns on myESPN - it is still part of your online attention stream (in my humble opinion)
• If review 10 stocks performance every morning on myWSJ — they are still part of your online attention stream (again in my opinion)

… this is true even if you never click on one of the links to read more.

This is not just important academically, we also need to make sure this part of our attention stream recieves some value for sharing it.  This could be financial or other things as I’ve written about before.  For example a non-financial value - would be receiving personalized search at results that incorporate your sports / finance preferences from your startup page on another site.