Hyperaggregate This!
About two years ago, I was meeting with a group of journalists and bloggers at an unconference in Philadelphia. The group, norgs, got together to try and envision ways to engineer an ideal newsgathering organization of the future.
At the conference, I talked about the role aggregators will play in how and when we get content. Some of that is playing out and has been for some time. Bloglines, for example, is a popular RSS aggregator that delivers me cherry picked headlines throughout the day - and unless I'm moved to click, I rarely visit that feed's website.
Since then, the amount of new content on the web has grown exponentially. It's not enough for me to type a search into Google, even if I do know some nifty tricks to circumvent all the information that I don't want.
What's the Web 2.0 solution? Hyperaggregators -- aggregators that aggregate the aggregators.
Meet SideKlick, an aggregator that combs YouTube and Google for video you specifically request. Popurls crawls through del.icio.us, digg, flickr, newsvine, ifilm (remember ifilm?), news.google, news.yahoo, fark, odeo, furl and a whole bunch of other aggregators to deliver what you want. Other hyperaggregators to watch include Original Signal and Spokeo (slick landing page w/ cute Firefox-esque mascot).
How might this apply to traditional media? Reporters, start using hyperaggregators to cover your beats. Covering city hall? Configure Popurls to search aggregators for you. And to publishers, I say this: find a way to make your content easily tagged, easily crawled and easily viewed either on or off your site.