The buzz about local aggregation
I wrote a blog entry for The Media Center’s blog, Morph, this morning about this business involving the French news agency suing Google over scraping its headlines for Google News. (NOTE: I’ve agreed to become a contributor to Morph.) I noted that Topix.net provides a similar conundrum for local media outlets. They like the traffic, but they wonder about whether they shouldn’t be compensated in some way. Moreover, I’ve heard the argument that the users Topix.net provides aren’t generally “local” users, so the traffic is meaningless to local advertisers.
Lo and behold, Topix.net goes ahead and sells a 75% stake to Gannett, Knight Ridder, and the Tribune Company, and the blogosphere is humming about the topic, er, Topix. (Poynter, Paid Content, Jeff Jarvis, John Battelle)
Most of the buzz is about how this move is evidence that newspaper companies are scared of the Web. But I like what Jeff says:
Unlike the idiotic Agence France Presse (hey, what do you expect… they’re French), these companies — like The New York Times, which bought promotion on Topix — recognize the need for (a) aggregation of news for consumer convenience, (b) getting audience from such services, and (c) the distributed nature of news and media in the future.
News organizations should start learning about the semantic web now and revamp their online services to leverage it, if they still wish to be viable in coming decades.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 23rd, 2005 at 1:30 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
