RSS feedCNet is starting to get it. Today they announced Newsburst, an online aggregator. Or as they put it:
Newsburst is a personalized tool that tracks virtually any type of information on the Web: news, blogs, shopping lists, weather, search results, alerts, auctions and more.
Information is everywhere, and Newsburst lets you access it from one place. Read differently.
Sure, it’s a feed reader (or RSS reader, if you’re drinking the Cool Aid), but it changes the game in several ways.
As far as I’m aware, this is the first big content producer to provide an aggregation front end to their and other providers’ content, without simply rebranding a third party reader. This and their size in the market, gives them unprecedented access to content, metadata, data analysis and consumption statistics. Sure, Bloglines and many others provide a similar service, but they aren’t a content publisher, and must survive on what they can scrape from feeds and public web sites.
CNet has access to the full original content and metadata, so by centralising the aggregation with their own front end, they’ve effectively cut out the lossy middle man. This is personalised consumption from behind the big media firewall. The catch of course is whether they intend to keep the same controls over their content as big media has in the past, or whether they really do get what aggregation is about, relinquishing control.
In previous posts Content as product, a new nirvana and The Mrs Soccer Mum news filter, I talked about content producers changing their ways, to provide customised content for consumers, the way we want it. In the case of CNet, they’re supposed to know the technology space, so who better to develop interesting ways to produce customised content, based on metadata, filtering and data analysis? And if they had full access to the original content, who knows what they could come up with. Oh hang on a second, they do! 🙂
Newsburst. Take a good look. It’s platform/machine independent, backed by a content publisher, and treats RSS the way it should, as just another data source that can be combined into a single personalised information consumption tool, just the way we here at Synop like it. Blog readers be afraid, be very afraid.
Update: This post was originally made to my Synop weblog.
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