In the last few days the new Italian portal www.italia.it has been presented to the press.

A few hours later a lot of blog posts have begun to appear with a lot of criticism.

I wont link anything here but a quick technorati search will help you find most of these posts.

I basically agree on most of the comments. From a technical standpoint it could have be done better, it has accessibility problems, it’s not well designed to be search engine friendly and so on.

Moreover, 45 millions euros is (probably) a terrible waste of public money.

I really think that the talks about italia.it have shown some frustration. Basically all of the negative comments come from people heavily involved in the internet market. I will include myself in this list.

Most of us are trying to push the internet thing in our companies. We are all struggling every single day to make things happen in a different way. We all know about Web 2.0, Ajax, Web services, etc. Someone is already talking about Web 3.0.

How many of us can make a clear statement and say that they are really effective in doing this in their companies?

Please note that I am not saying that we should not do this. I am saying that italia.it has been a very good opportunity to shoot at the biggest company in Italy (the public thing) without taking any real risk.

Probably each of us would have like to shoot at someone in our own company for the same exact reason.

I understand that this may sound provocative and I do not want to say that we should not be upset for the italia.it project. Someone should explain how that money has been spent or is going to be spent in the future and how the project is organized in detail.

Why do I blog this? Probably because I feel frustrated too.