A few days ago Jay Fienberg wrote an interesting essay called Aggregation piracy and playlist artistry:

It's so easy to publish blogs that there are tons of them, and the effort to aggregate them is beginning to again attract editor-like and writer-like functions.

...the dividing lines between manually generated content, content generated by bots reaping the manual content, and insight generated as bots become refined enough to perform a curatorial role."

A good role model for this type of editorial functionality is Amazon. Ever since they opened for business in 1995 (10 years ago, seems like an eternity in Web time!), Amazon has provided interactive functionality on their site and they raise the bar every year. Although their core task is to aggregate information about their products - e.g. books - what makes Amazon stand out from its competitors is their ability to creatively mine that aggregated data and enable users to do all sorts of things with it. Including, most importantly, contributing to the data (user reviews, etc). Which of course leads to more content/data to aggregate!

Giving a low key nod towards your sponsor

Some of the Web 2.0 trends and talk I tracked this week... accompanied by some dodgy Austin Powers subheaders. Oh and this post doubles for my Marqui shout-out this week. Thanks to Marqui for sponsoring my blog for 3 months. Oh behave!