Gathering

Content aggregation sites are popping up everywhere. In short, they do little more than assemble others content and enable you to triangulate off read it (in other words - determine how hot the content is and what you should be paying attention to). The latest being Gather. Gather is like a big chat room without the chat. Instead of chatting, you write and post. Others read. And the more they read, the more money you make. You can leave comments if you are a member. Others include Newsvine.

Jim Manzi is behind Gather and had this to say in the Boston Globe: ''No longer must I accept much of my content from what I have called the Literary Industrial Complex, that group of concentrated media organizations with their small elites and self-reinforcing arbiters delivering my news and information 'top-down,' ". He has written moreon this over at Gather.

Ah, yeah Jim. If they are so evil and unnecessary, why choose to announce your venture in the Literary Industrial Complex and not in your own blog? Actually, where is your blog mate?

Looking at Gather, I'm not sure their cluttered design and jamming of content into the limits of the browser is any improvement on conventional news sites. And if I am going to read the thinking of ordinary people I'm (personally) more likely to read, well, Blogs than a site like Gather.

I also wonder how this will influence PR going forward - at what point do the PR Pros start looking at the more prominent writers (the best paid) and target them as a core element of programs. Assuming that Gather can gather readers, you can pretty much bet on that happening. At which point, I wonder how Gather will gather its writers and manage the editorial quality.

Kareem suggests that revenue sharing won't hook bloggers. I'm with him. This is a conversation for me (and indulgence).

Techcrunch covers this as does Mathew Ingram. Steve thinks there is a Web 2.0 crash coming. He is as right on that as predicting the Sun will come up tomorrow. Steve is also right that unless they plug into the ecosystem they will fail. Information is a commodity in the Web 2.0 market and commodity markets depend on creating convenience for the buyer. No Adsense = much fewer sales. No tags (external, not just internal) = fewer readers. Much fewer readers.

To this point, Gather is a very closed ecosystem. Their opportunity was to make it open. Tag not just Gather content but all content. Enable trackbacks and show who is linking and commenting outside of the site. This is more akin to Yahoo or AOL than a blog.

Whether Gather succeeds or not is pretty much a crap-shoot - although I am sure they have a more determined sense of the outcome. What matters is that they are innovating, testing new models, learning and adapting. Those that don't will die. The rest learn.

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