Smart aggregation – a family affair?
Jinfo Blog

9th February 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Search, aggregation & syndication seems to be one of the very few segments showing positive growth in a dismal 2009 for the information industry. The glum news comes from Outsell’s preliminary Information Industry Market Size & Share Rankings results for 2009 (purchase details at http://digbig.com/5bbbna), which calculates that the industry lost 8.4% of its value last year, with declines of up to 19% in some segments. If search is one of the few bright spots in Outsell’s results, Deloitte’s annual Telecommunications Predictions report for 2010 (http://digbig.com/5bbbnb) suggests that it could be mobile devices that see much of the future action. Modest revenues in the first instance could mean that much of this activity falls outside the radar screens of both analysts and the press, Deloitte says – but by the end of the year, search could be one of the five most used smartphone applications. With more searching available on more platforms, it’s small wonder that traditional media currently see licensing mainstream aggregators as one revenue lifeline. But those aggregators are likely to play a smaller and smaller part in aggregation activity that is becoming both more collaborative and smarter. Indeed, as Penny Crossland reports (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27766), research from Ovum suggests that the primary beneficiaries of any attempts to move to paid-for content models will not be media conglomerates, but service and technology vendors looking to monetise this opportunity and create new consumption platforms for rich news media (http://digbig.com/5bbbnp – registration required). One provider of such rich news might be Azeem Azhar, a former Economist journalist and Reuters Innovation executive. Feeling frustrated (on his own admission) by ‘a lack of aggregators that provided depth and perspectives behind business news stories’, he’s launched Viewsflow. Positively encouraging user contribution – as well as investing actively in content sourcing – Viewsflow focuses not on the raw news but on opinion and analysis. Tracking the world’s leading influencers – whether well-known global publications or little-known bloggers – it allows users to leverage the power of social media to share their insights (http://digbig.com/5bbbnc). What works in the wider world works in-house too. Enterprise 2.0 specialist NewsGator (which has recently expanded its own empire by acquiring government 2.0 specialist Tomoye) quotes research from Forrester which predicts that Enterprise 2.0 will become a $4.6 billion industry by 2013 and that social networking tools will garner the bulk of that sum (http://digbig.com/5bbbnd). If expert comment, not raw information, does become the value proposition of the future, how should corporate information professionals capitalise? Reading the runes offered by all these disparate but converging developments, one way could be by championing efficient use of search and aggregation in-house or on the road – and adding a goodly dose of wisdom of crowds in the process.

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