Jeff Jarvis and others have been screaming for a while now that portals were dead. Big means nothing, they say, and networks are were the real conversation – and the most value – are to be found.

Onet.pl views things differently. It opened in 1996 as a catalogue of Polish websites, much like Yahoo did in the US.

In Onet’s offices in Cracow, we met with Michal Bonarowski, chief editor of publishing, i.e. responsible for all content.

He said Onet had a very different vision of the portal compared to Yahoo and other rapidly-bankrupting portals we see in the west. Rather than to organize content, Onet must revolve around the conversation, he says. To achieve that, on-site content must have deep roots.

As far as news is concerned, it means employing 100 journalists in-house, full time. From what I remember, Yahoo! France employs less than 10 journalists (if you have more precise data, do tell me in the comments) for a market twice as big.

On top of that, Onet engages the community in many more ways than Yahoo does. Having to make do without fancy services like Yahoo!Answers, Onet opened uncensored forums, encourages the discussion on news stories and started an iReport-clone, Cynk. Users send 20 to 30 news items a day, a figure much higher than the other Polish citJ projects I’ve heard of. Journalists monitor these contributions, check them and, if true, send them to the regular edition.

Onet did venture into the blogosphere with Onet blogs but that did not make it change strategy. They boast 1.6 million accounts and 800,000 active blogs. That’s approximately 50% of the local blogosphere. Despite these impressive figures, the ads they display on their blog engine are sold in bulk and, says Michal Bonarowski, they don’t bring in much revenue.

Unlike portals that merely offered content, Onet succeeded in leveraging its community, something Yahoo has been told to do for a long time – to no avail.

The threat comes mostly from Google, which recently stepped up its efforts in Poland and opened a local version of Google News. The idea that the Californian behemoth could suck up all the syndicated content Onet uses on top of its own production pushes Bonarowski to say that he “doesn’t know if Onet will survive”, especially if Google hires a local salesforce.