With all the content out there on the web, how do users decide what to pay attention to? In the “attention economy,” time is at a premium. RSS has made us ruthlessly efficient media consumers. But we still desire editors to trim away the fat and give us the skinny on what’s cool, important, and newsworthy. As content floods the web, RSS will make these “newsmasters” ruthlessly efficient aggregators.
Daily Candy, Flavorpill, and Thrillist are a few of the aggregators of today that communities of readers have come to trust to help direct their daily news consumption. Daily Candy’s geotargetted newsletters have earned them a loyal subscription base of fashionistas. Thrillist pares the world down to a single idea for your inbox. And Flavorpill’s cultural emails have expanded into art, fashion, world news, and design niches. All of these properties provide extremely focused emails for a dedicated audience around a specific subject matter.
But Youth eschew email for SNS, IM and mobile. Now that our worlds are wired, these influencers will need to reach their audiences in different ways. To that end, Daily Candy, TrendHunter, and Flavorpill are expanding their reach via mobile. Today these are simply extensions to the mobile environment, but they will start to pave the way for them to offer an always-on newsfeed. We’ll see more curated LBS services like 80108, which texts local event info to users on the go.
Across all platforms—mobile, email and even SNS—RSS is enabling the rise of the newsmaster. Youth are much better synthesizers of information and can handle many more information streams a day. Sites like RcrdLbl will begin to emerge. This curated collection of exclusive tracks by hand-picked artists—all free—is completely RSS-automated: tour dates, new tracks, artist information, editorial content… Just set your preferences. I’d bet this service will eventually be extended to mobile and include numerous location based features like ticket buying, on-site music downloads, friend and after-party finders, mo-blogging, live concert reviews, and much more.
On the flip side, RSS will enable newsmasters to “set their preferences.” They will hone their feeds to perfection so they no longer have to do the work of combing through everything everything. This can only happen once they’ve specialized and refined their niches, or become hyperaggregators (aggregating aggregators). This is exactly what the fansite HPANA does with Harry Potter news and rumors. Why go to any other site? It’s all there.
Ultimately, there is a need for human intelligence. But the key will be combining it with technology. Look at new search engines like Jason Calicanis’ Mahalo, Yahoo! Answers, and Naver in
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