Content aggregation is the new black

Content aggregation… that’s been what’s on my mind as of late (well, what’s been on my mind that I feel like posting on this blog in any event.)

So lots of people what to make content, right? Everyone’s a critic, a pundit, a poet, an intellectual, a comedian….whatev, whatev.

And hey, that’s great. All sorts of people turning out all sorts of content and for the most part, the content is really only of value to the content-producer’s mother. But somewhere, somehow amongst all that mediocre stuff must be some good stuff, or at least some stuff you can convince someone to pay for or otherwise sponsor. This isn’t Chris Anderson “Long Tail” stuff… that’s not what I’m referring to. Well, OK, maybe I am a little but long tail stuff really isn’t of interest to me at the moment.

What is of interest to aggregating all sorts of content until the aggregated whole is greater than the sum of its disaggregated parts.

I was blown away by the deal SeekingAlpha cut with YahooFinance! I mean, that was awesome.

What is interesting about this deal is that SeekingAlpha is a blog that aggregates financial and stock information from many different individual contributors. Some are in the finance business already; some are private, individual investors; some are independent bloggers; and there is even a PR person who contributes regularly.

Once comments are on the SeekingAlpha blog, they will now be linked to a company's page on YahooFinance, right next to articles by mainstream business publications and even the company’s own press releases.

SeekingAlpha does’t write-up diddly-squat, they just rely on their contributors who post their thoughts for… get this… FREE. SeekAlpha gets tons of content that they pass along to Yahoo and they pay jack to the content providers. Now there is a business model if I ever heard one. True, they do apparently pay some human editors to go through the stuff so the content doesn’t read as free as is costs.

Anyway, I still think it is pretty cool.