Everywhere you turn, it seems that an online aggregator is trying to capture your attention.
Some of the newcomers in news space include newsflashr, Yahoo Buzz and Naubo, relative newcomers such as Blogrunner and Daylife, as well as a soon-to-be aggregator from Tina Brown and Barry Diller. Then, you’ve got social aggregators such as FriendFeed.
There’s always a new, hot trend on the Web, and aggregation suddenly seems to be where it’s at. The big question is: why and why now? Arguably, it’s because the more people use the Web to consume, create and share content, the more difficult to find what you want in one place. Aggregation services are, in a sense, the Web’s 7-11s where you can find a variety of stuff (although far from everything) at a single location.
To me, the more promising area seems to be news aggregation because it comes across as a more valuable and accessible service. Depending on the type of information you, news aggregators can meet your needs with less effort and noise than social aggregators.
Newsflashr, which recently received a rave review from Barron’s, has a user-friendly interface where you can find the news you want through the use of keywords of different sizes and colors, while Naubu, which is focused on technology news, has potential to become a rival to Techmeme.
The biggest problem facing news aggregators and, for that matter, social aggregator is competition. There’s so many solid choices that news and social junkies can pick, choose, use and, unfortunately, leave quickly and easily.
More: ReadWriteWeb looks at a variety of choices for people who want tech news perhaps want to give something other than Techmeme a shot.
Technorati Tags: Techmeme
2 Comments
Yeah – there’s really no barrier to entry into the aggregator space – just time that needs to be invested.
For those interested in a techmeme alternative, I think techwatching.com (my own entry) offers some good features – customized rss feeds, topical summaries, and news less dominated by major outlets, for those who are looking for more alternative coverage.
As noted on RWW, however, I’m in SE Asia volunteering indefinitely, so upgrades and fixes to the site may take some time.
On a related note, I just deployed a second instance of the TechWatching system at http://wheelscore.com – tracking automotive news.
Regards,
-Rod.
News aggregation is certainly hot right now, but it takes a lot of work to aggregate news effectively.
It’s definitely going to be interesting to see how the playing field evolves over the next year.
Brandon Watts
Daylife Evangelist