Newsburst

posted: 2005-02-10 00:01:59 perma-link, RSS comments feed

CNN has launched its own personalized RSS service called NewsBurst.
It's only been a matter of time. As Steve Rubel points out, "this is the beginning of a trend."

Of course, the bigger trend is that of consolidation. As with highlanders, there can be only one. Basically, we're talking about my.yahoo, my.guadian, my.cnn, etc., as the bigger media outlets let the rest of the net worry about local coverage, they'll merely aggregate it.

Personally, I'm betting that aggregation is merely the beginning. I have my own "megragator" for RSS feeds that covers over 3000 sources at this point, and have begun experiments with bayesian filtering techniques to sort out the wheat from the chaff. Without such technology, we're back to needing editors to help people find feeds and entries worthy of their time, and the net is loathe to allow that which smells of consolitated censorship. It's google search versus yahoo's human categorization all over again. The net needs editors, but it wants the ratio of editors to users to be as close to 1:1 as possible.

Here's Yelvington's bottom line:

Here's the haunting part: I don't think we've made much progress toward understanding the role shift or the new business model.

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