Aggregation -- the next innovation for 'web 2.0'?

I believe aggregation and curation are going to contiue to be very interesting spaces in the near future. As so much content explodes from the legions of citizen journalists, artists, filmmakers and others that just want to communicate it will be impossible to find all the related content you'd want to consume without some help.

I think services that find the content for you, akin to something like Utne Reader in the magazine world, and allow you to edit/create content are going to be sorely needed sooner than we think.

As this has been on my mind, I came across Spokeo this weekend. I can see how the functionality it provides starts to build that more powerful 'one stop shop' page. Aggregation is based on the activities and services you already participate in.

It's essentially a page that brings in many of the most popular networking sites and services from the Internet today. The service it provides is a platform upon which you can leverage the social networks you already participate in while also continuing to add your own info.

I played with it for awhile and it works great. The user interface is easy to understand, gives great feedback and actually does a good job of encouraging someone to sign up.

So if we play platforms like these out into the future, we start to see some people emerging as organizers of content, those people might publish that content organziation out to a larger group of people that don't have the time or patience to go through it in as much detail. It creates that level of curation and lots of opportunity for interesting things to emerge.

I think the future holds some exciting times for innovation about how to present and consume the added volume of content that is being created. And also ways for people to consume much more specifically things that interest them.

  Posted by evoljennifer ( Dec 03 2006, 04:32:59 PM MST ) Permalink Comments [1]

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