ReadWriteWeb

News is delivered in many different ways via the Internet. With so many blogs and news sites, it is sometimes hard to keep up and know if you're really getting all the day's top headlines. That's where content aggregation comes into play. Aggregators are sites specifically designed to bring multiple news sources together and repackage them in a more convenient form. These sites make it possible to track and digest the day's top news with minimal effort. But there is more than one method of aggregation, so which is right for you?

Below, I will take a look at five different techniques for aggregating the day's top news: Single Stream Aggregation, Single Page Aggregation, Meme Aggregation, People Powered Aggregation, and Edited Aggregation. For this round up I will use only sports-related sites.

Written by Guest blogger, Andrew Watson

In this article we'll compare Six Apart and Automattic, two independent firms focused on blogging software. Most other blog platforms are owned by big companies (e.g. Google owns Blogger), so the competition between Six Apart and Automattic is intriguing. Six Apart is the firm behind Movable Type, TypePad, LiveJournal, and Vox, while Automattic is associated with WordPress.

Overview Comparison

Bay Partners, a San Francisco area venture capital fund that invests in Eventful, PicksPal, and Riya among others, has announced AppFactory a seed fund aimed at developers on the Facebook Platform. AppFactory will invest $25,000 to $250,000 in each Facebook app as well as offering technical and business assistance and mentoring. The program is being headed by Salil Deshpande and Angela Strange and will specifically target applications being launched for the Facebook platform, or existing companies who are "changing their strategy to become a Facebook focused application."

The AppFactory investment program joins a pool of new, low-dollar investment funds such as Charles River Ventures' QuickStart program, Y Combinator, and TechStars. But perhaps it is most comparable to Google's Gadget Ventures program, because it is focused on a specific platform.

File this one under the "bad ideas" folder. If you thought PayPerPost and ReviewMe, which some have likened to payola, were bad, get ready for Buy Blog Comments, a service that lets marketers pay for comment spam.

Darren Rowse calls Buy Blog Comments "one of the worst business ideas [he has] heard for a long time," and I am obliged to agree. This is not only a monumentally poor idea, but one that is potentially dangerous for the blogosphere as a whole.

Just a week after acquiring online telephony service GrandCentral, Google has announced the $625M purchase of Postini - a company that offers "on-demand communications security and compliance solutions serving more than 35,000 businesses and 10 million users worldwide." The press release noted:

"Postini's services -- which include message security, archiving, encryption, and policy enforcement -- can be used to protect a company's email, instant messaging, and other web-based communications."

Google's Web Office ambitions are being well and truly fleshed out in 2007. CEO Eric Schmidt says that "with this transaction, we're reinforcing our commitment to delivering compelling hosted applications to businesses of all sizes." In other words, Google Apps isn't just for small and medium sized businesses anymore.

An AP report today states that Nielsen/NetRatings, one of the leading Internet stats services, will "scrap rankings" based on page views and replace it with how long visitors spend at websites. The reason is that online video and technologies such as Ajax "increasingly make page views less meaningful." We've known for some time, but it's big news if a major stats service like Nielsen/NetRatings officially degrades the importance of page views. Note that later in the AP article, it states that Nielsen won't be fully scrapping page views - they "will still provide page view figures but won't formally rank them".

The AP article details two cases where this change in focus will provide a noticeable change in bigco rankings:

Amazon has long been one of my favorite sites on the web. It seems that every week I have a package arriving at my door from Amazon (or Threadless), but with such an immense array of products, browsing and searching them can become a chore. Below I'll take a look at five different visualizations that let you browse and find Amazon products in completely new ways. None of these are necessarily new sites, but they're all interesting and some are very useful and fun ways to browse through Amazon's massive catalog.

This Tuesday social web browser Flock will release Version 0.9, as they inch towards the full 1.0. Version 0.9 is currently available to early adopters as a 'Release Candidate'. I had an in-depth chat with Flock's CEO Shawn Hardin last week and I have been testing the 0.9 version too. The actual version I have been running is 0.899.1, but the improvements over v0.7 are no less evident. Flock's latest upgrade is geared towards increased "discoverability" for users and further delineates it from conventional browsers. Shawn explained the reasons behind these changes...

This week's poll is an extension of our 2007 Half-Year Web Technology Report, which reviewed the first six months of this year in web technology. In that report, I noted that Google and Facebook have been the two companies to impress me so far this year. But what do you think?

We've asked a similar question before, in December before we did our Best BigCo of 2006 post. At that time, Google got a whopping 54% of the votes, with Amazon the next best at 14%. Also, in Dec '06, Facebook weren't even in the running. But as I noted in the 2007 Half-Year Report, Facebook has virtually built itself into a BigCo over the past six months.

Last week we wrote about Digital Life - the rise of life-like digital experiences. We argued that online worlds like Second Life are becoming increasingly more engaging because of their realism. We noted that Second Life succeeds because it brings to the digital world real economics, geography and, of course, physics. Last week we also wrote about iPhone and why it might really matter. This week we are going to look at iPhone from the perspective of Digital Life.

Many agree that the iPhone is a breakthrough handheld device. It has many impressive qualities, but perhaps one of the most interesting ones is that it leverages and even bends the laws of physics. Apple's software is tuned to respond to our hand gestures in a way that makes an impression of interaction with the physical object. Yet, the interactions are fundamentally digital. Everything feels light and easy because there is no friction.