Earlier this week, Steve Rubel had a terrific post on the challenges facing content owners at a time when consumers can compile the information they want (RSS feeds, images, video) into personalized portals such as Pageflakes or Windows Live. He contends this will make it increasingly difficult for content owners to make money online.

“If almost all content can be lifted from one spot and placed somewhere where it’s more convenient to the user, just how will it be monetized? The ramifications reach far and wide. It will impact anyone that wants to attract eyeballs – media companies, brand marketers and community/social networking sites.”

Rubel’s theory got me thinking about the Web 2.0 landscape where thousands upon thousands of applications/services are battling for attention. Since most of these applications are free, they need to attract a lot of users to be stay viable when the venture capital runs out.

One of the big challenges facing these applications is intense competition and, I would argue, a short attention-span among users. This means an application that is interesting enough to try and perhaps use today is quickly discarded when something that seems more interesting comes along. My Roboform database, for example, is chock-a-block with passwords for applications I haven’t used in months.

What be the salvation for many Web 2.0 applications is a place where users can aggregate all their favourites through widgets. For example, you could have GMail, Facebook, Skype and Basecamp accounts on a single destination with a common username and password. Whenever you found a new and interesting application, you would simply hit the widget button and have it imported into your Web 2.0 Portal/aggregator.

For consumers, this would offer a lot of convenience and maybe encourage people to use their applications on a regular basis or, at least, be aware they are available as opposed to gathering dust unseen and unused. For Web 2.0 companies, it could give their applications some stickiness based on the idea that once a consumer adds a new application to their portal, there would be a higher likelihood it would actually be used.