The Modern Journalist

MS Live News, Like Google News Only…Like Google News

I worked on a story yesterday for Ecommerce Times about Gawker Media selling off three of its properties. In the course of reporting the story, I talked to an author who researched trends in media. His take: people are moving from a personality-centric news source to an aggregation service that provides them with the best information on a topic.

I’m not sure I buy that, but I’ve seen how cable television works — so I can’t discount that completely (although the TV comparison fails miserably when applied to HOW the Internet works. But, let’s just go with it.)

My friends at Cnet News have a piece about Microsoft Live News, an aggregation service that works similarly to Google News, which to me falls into the category of an aggregation service built around one topic.

Sort of.

I’m about to jump around a bit, but we’ll get back to it. Don’t worry.

I’ve been having an argument with Guy Kawasaki about his new “aggregation” service, Alltop. It’s an ego-driven concept, where he (and presumably a team) gets his friends to send him what they deem the most interesting blogs and non-mainstream content produced around a certain subject. It’s updated on a daily basis (I think, I’m not exactly sure how it works and the interface is pretty bad).

It is, for all intents and purposes, a human RSS feed.

This is different than Google News and Microsoft Live News, which are machine-generated RSS feeds.

They each offer something unique, a perspective on events broken down along arbitrary lines. Alltop can clearly create niche-oriented lists since they don’t really rely on keywords and metadata to build their lists. Google and Microsoft can much more easily troll the Web and keep things updated.

Where’s the soft spot?

My guess is that it’s still in the personalization of information, which means both Alltop and Google exist for my benefit to do with what I want. Ultimately, I don’t see how a personalized aggregator such as Alltop can exist financially since it’s easily replicated and not so easily maintained. Particularly when I’m just going to grab the RSS feeds I want and run them through my own Reader.

What is likely going to happen is that Google and Microsoft will get much better at trolling the blogosphere and nether-reaches of the Web, where content is created but not always seen. And it will be our job — and our friends’ jobs — to parse through what we think is important.