Portals for Older People in Regional Areas

Abstract

GreyPath is a Web portal designed to provide information, services, facilities and links useful to older people. Although carrying some advertising and offering some services for a charge, use of the portal is free. This chapter examines potential uses of this portal and how it might be able to foster the creation and maintenance of virtual Internet communities of older people that could be of benefit to older Australians regardless of where they live. Virtual Internet communities like this are of particular importance to people living in regional or remote areas, those with a disability of some kind, and those who, for whatever reason, find it difficult to mix with other people with similar interests. Although further work needs to be done to assess the effectiveness of the GreyPath portal in fulfilling the needs of older people, this chapter identifies potential advantages of portal technology in this context.

Gateways to Portals Research

“…The GreyPath portal (Lepa and Tatnall 2002;Tatnall and Lepa 2003;Lepa and Tatnall 2006) is a community portal set up to fill the Web access needs of 'older people'. GreyPath was designed to provide information, services, facilities and useful links for use by these older people and although carrying some advertising and offering some services for a charge, use of the portal is free.…”

“…The GreyPath portal designer describes the portal as demographically inclusive and designed first and foremost to empower seniors. He claims that it has an ability to encourage site loyalty, as well as identification with and participation from its constituency (Lepa and Tatnall 2002). At its instigation, GreyPath had three major components.…”