New Feedly Logo Is Nice
via blog.feedly.com
Interesting observation on big media's early iPad apps from Ryan Chittum at CJR
One big missing feature in the WSJ and NYT iPad apps: You can’t copy text. Take a screen cap of it all you want, but you can’t get the actual text. That’s a basic function on a computer, and the iPad has a clever cut-and-paste function, but it doesn’t work here.
That would seem to be a conscious decision and not just a missing feature in these quasi-beta apps. If so it will make it hard to blog or email about a story. Of course, it will also make it harder for people to rip off whole stories on splogs, and it could lesson the relevance of aggregators.
via cjr.org
Good Examples Of How Agencies Should Use Aggregators
"top interactive agencies and industry associations–including Ogilvy PR, Tribal DDB, WeissComm Group, Rumeur Publique, CRM Company Group and The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF)—are publishing their own personalized brand monitoring dashboards and expert knowledge portals using the latest edition of Netvibes Premium Dashboards to help clients and brand marketers better manage the real-time Web."
Pay attention to real-time news companies like Fwix
TechCrunch's Jason Kincaid describes the FWix model below.
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"The basic idea behind Fwix is fairly simple: it aggregates news articles and blog posts that are relevant to a certain region (the site now features support for over 80 cities in the United States and Canada). To do this, the Fwix team selects news sources and blogs that it thinks are related to each city, and also uses automated algorithms to determine when other content might also be relevant."
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You can't turn around without seeing a company targeting the aggregation and content markets. With social networks and media converging, the ability to filter and aggregate information isn't just important to publishers, it's important for every company. The ability to cut through mountains of information is increasingly becoming a competitive advantage.
Never has the "get the right info to the right person at the right time" saying rang more true. That expertise will ultimately be one of your company's biggest assets. Hell, in some organizations is it's the only real differentiator. So pay attention to the the way news and information is being used -- and pay special attention to the companies that are innovating in the space. They could be your next competitor..or partner.
What Else Can We Glean From The Rise Of Google Reader?
via louisgray.com
Louis Gray points to another graveyard created by Google -- the market for standalone RSS readers. But the snippet that stands out for me is this one:
"not only is innovation alive and well, but blogs and RSS are key components in creating new products." Exactly.
Let's take that a bit further. Many of us describe RSS as plumbing, infrastructure, whatever. What we mean is that it's important technology that facilitates how we use the internet as a platform. And it enables other services and tools to work properly as we slice, dice and interact with information across the web. Transporting data via RSS is something that every new service or tool will provide, at least to some extent.
Owning big pieces of the RSS and blog pie (Blogger.com) gives Google an advantage in a number of ways. Not only can it cherry-pick its way to the internet acquisition top, it gains valuable insight around the real-time web.As it delivers RSS-powered content via Google Reader, it can use the same lens to understand who's actually creating all that content. That's insight that's priceless as big companies pay big bucks for insight into the web's data streams.
The bigger question is what other pieces are ripe for the taking? I think the Yahoo, Microsoft deal answered that for us.
George Dearing
Founder @ Dearing Group LLC.
George can be reached via email at george@dearinggroup.com or on Twitter, and Facebook Subscribe to this site via RSS here.
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