This is kind of useful. Mashable.com offers a comparison of 14 options for personal home pages. I use both Netvibes and iGoogle myself. The core idea is that personal home pages provide the means to integrate a wide variety of information sources and make this information available at a glance. You can craft this page using widgets so you need little experience creating web pages. You can set your browser to automatically bring up this page when it is launched. Local weather, a todo list, RSS feeds, images from Flickr, etc. integrated as your home page.
Resized screen capture of my igoogle page.
