The NYT has another good one - about comparison shopping. I have always been quite reluctant with the revenue potential of such portals. But it seems they are going to spring up everywhere. shopping.com now starts with products like apparel, which are much more difficult to compare. The only revenue channel is sales provision and some plain banners. On the cost side you have the traffic, software development and more importantly content management. It might be true that Froogle.com has some mysterious low cost spider technology, but missing this, how can you make such a site valuable for customers and profitable at the same time?