Monday, May 21, 2007

What would we do without the News Indexes?

Goggle’s rumored deal with some large British news groups to formally license content for Google news ala Yahoo news (mostly from AP) has 3 main implications if true:

1. Is this the end for aggregators such as Goggle news, Digg (news link + comments), Techmeme (ranked news link plus summaries) and other players, meaning that ‘Fair use’ argument won’t cut any more?

I doubt it happening in the United States and elsewhere. On the other hand, Europe is more conservative vis-à-vis Fair use.

Links are the currencies of the internet. Enough said. Currencies don’t belong in dark, bottomless pits.

2. Let’s take it the other way. It is the media sites which profit from traffic from Google news and other aggregators, in one way or another. How will they pay the aggregators for all the traffic and have they ever paid for the traffic?

3. What is with the large news sites?
Do they hold a monopoly for quality news articles?

I observed myself using Google news searching for the latest on American Idol – a long list of stories comes up and I scan the headlines and excerpts, clicking on the story I find most alluring.

Did I look at whether it is NYT story? No, I didn't.
As Akbar the Great used to say, 'it is only incidental that I am a Muslim.
Get the drift?

Many small sites and blogs have made name for themselves through Google news.

It is hubris from main media too, thinking only they can carry great stories online, where only the best headline gets the click.

Techmeme is a shiny example as being an aggregator supporting an albeit select (1000?) group of blogs and the blogs are not complaining for the link and excerpt.

Time for the thick headed to admit that they fear competition from smaller web sites and blogs – fearing their expensive (per post basis) story not shining out in a list of 1000 similar stories.

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posted by Pramit Singh @ 9:15 PM

1 Comments:

At 1:03 PM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

I was half expecting an announcement somewhere on TC, but trying to “search” for Crunchbase leads you no where. And this is in small part because searching for something only gives you a small number of queries (five) without any links to any prior entries (you can get around this by adding “&paged=x” where x is the number of pages back you want to go, however).

 

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