A VC - Latest Comments in Celebrating Aggregation

Re: Celebrating Aggregation

William Mougayar — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 18:31:20 -0000

Fred, I've sent you an email with an activation link to your personalized dashboard super aggregator with semantic indexing, using the Eqentia platform.

Re: Celebrating Aggregation

deeba — Sun, 24 May 2009 23:58:15 -0000

This is a great post. I love Tastespotting. It's a great aggregator...very droolicious too!

Re: Celebrating Aggregation

ravisohal — Mon, 04 May 2009 17:11:06 -0000

Aggregation is breaking down content - in a good way for users/consumers. When we aggregate content we end up creating useful information verticals - so we get local restaurant aggregators and menu aggregators (eg foodiebytes.com). It creates a lot of contact points for the publisher. It also changes the fundamentals on how this is monetized - which I think is still a bit up in the air. Probably why the big media publishers are queasy.

Re: Celebrating Aggregation

fredwilson — Mon, 04 May 2009 13:53:02 -0000

that is so right, but if you don't participate in the discussion, you've really missed the whole point of social media

Re: Celebrating Aggregation

William Mougayar — Sun, 03 May 2009 19:12:38 -0000

Fred, I will email you on this.

Re: Celebrating Aggregation

William Mougayar — Sun, 03 May 2009 19:10:55 -0000

Old media is furious because most of them haven't been able to successfuly migrate to social media.
The modus operandi of (most of) their writers doesn't allow them to be fully participative in the conversations of their readers because the pressures to move on to the next story.

Re: Celebrating Aggregation

fredwilson — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 06:57:13 -0000

All we have is anecdotal data and from that I can tell you people find and get jobs on indeed every day

Re: Celebrating Aggregation

guruvan — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 19:40:28 -0000

lol..I knew you would say something like that. I was hoping you would see the point there though.

I checked it out in the first place because I was seeing recomendations for it from everywhere. I certainly can't ignore people recommending job sites. But when I got there, all I saw were the same things posted everywhere else, and I was at a loss to understand what the difference was between Indeed.com and everything else.

I'm not saying that its not just fine, I'm just looking for something that a site does besides aggregate content.

And the key word in your comment is "seem" How exactly can you tell if they ARE getting value from it? The recommendations give me some indication, but I think people are likely to recommend just about anything that's new on the net.

The REAL indicator of value of a job site in particular (to me at least), is "How many people are being hired from jobs they found on that site"

I have to wonder if 10MM people aren't using it with the thought "leave no stone unturned" in the hopes of finding the very few posts that they haven't seen everywhere else. And of those 10MM people, how many are searching there 1,2,3,5 times a week? Just having that many registered users doesn't mean that much.

I'm not trying to denigrate the service, just trying to understand. I was hoping that as an investor you could shed some light on that.

Re: Celebrating Aggregation

fredwilson — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 19:06:36 -0000

Well over 10mm people a month seem to be getting value from indeed

Re: Celebrating Aggregation

fredwilson — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 19:04:18 -0000

Yes, but they are not a consumer facing service. They could enable that service easily

Re: Celebrating Aggregation

fredwilson — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 18:57:28 -0000

Cool. I'll check it out

Re: Celebrating Aggregation

guruvan — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 21:25:02 -0000

As a job seeker, the endless jobs aggregators are just killing me. Seeing the same jobs posted over and over and over to all these sites just seems like a huge waste. Most of the jobs seem to have been posted on Craigslist (usually by the hiring company) in the first place. What's the point of adding even more to this? I've found very little additional value in any of these, including the above mentioned one.

(color me a little frustrated on this issue)

What none of the jobs aggregators seem to (want to) do is add any additional value. If they did that then my tune would be different.

Aggregating content without adding value to it just doesn't seem so useful (in any field, not just jobs)

Re: Celebrating Aggregation

jolan — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 20:44:40 -0000

Isn't that what InfoNgen could do or does for the financial sector?

Re: Celebrating Aggregation

James — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 19:07:41 -0000

Fred,

http://www.yourhealthtopics... is a new health news aggregator. You can find the latest health news about dozens of different conditions and treatments. We just started it a couple of months ago, so it's still very much a work in progress, but we're getting there. Our approach is to use semantic text processing to understand what blog posts are about and aggregate them around topic areas. We also started other topic-specific aggregation sites around travel, sports, gossip, financial news, and tech.

Re: Celebrating Aggregation

Carl Rahn Griffith — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 10:22:21 -0000

As an avid consumer of news I don't care about the source of a story but rather the quality of the article (ie, the research/the writer/s) - sure, I initially associate some gravitas to anything i see that originates from (eg) wsj.com, economist.com, techcrunch.com, guardian.co.uk, etc, but my ultimate judgement as to the merits of a story are in its content, not where it was originally hosted/published from - the automated discovery and presentation of stories/news relevant to me is what is key - and where the real value lies ... this is where aggregation has so much potential ...

Re: Celebrating Aggregation

alancommike — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 18:12:58 -0000

Most, but not all, of the traditional media outlets in various niche markets (e.g food publlications) are now finally online. That's providing a cross-over aggregation where the target audience straddles new world web services with old world print publication. It's a little stretch on the typical thoughts of aggregation, but I think it fits.

This straddling is easy with food/recipes because the user wants to go back to previously seen recipes. The publishers started doing this with just their properties, CondeNast's Epicurious and Time's myrecipes. Of course the next step is to aggregate across publishers, which is what ProjectFoodie is doing now.

I haven't thought about other niches, but I'd expect that there's similar cross-over and may already be players there. As this matures, I expect the various niches will consolidate on common platforms.

...alan

Re: Celebrating Aggregation

David Semeria — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 16:36:24 -0000

Yes. And pretty much in-line with my own slightly Utopian views on the subject: http://lmframework.com/page...

Re: Celebrating Aggregation

MikePLewis — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 14:36:16 -0000

I love this post. Good one

Re: Celebrating Aggregation

David Buck — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 14:32:43 -0000

As former (yes, I accept congratulations for my escape) web publisher for two newspapers, I agree 100%. And, not a small addendum, newspapers seem to forget how much of what they publish is aggregated content too!

Re: Celebrating Aggregation

fredwilson — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 12:48:53 -0000

Yes, I left out RCP because I'm not spending a lot of time reading about politics right now but when I do, its my first stop

Re: Celebrating Aggregation

AnujMathur — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 12:44:38 -0000

the value of aggregators can lie not only in directing us to relevant / popular / important news items, but some actually do a great job of structuring their aggregation. i think the realclear's (RealClearSports / RealClearPolitics / RealClearMarkets) do a great job of this.

Re: Celebrating Aggregation

fredwilson — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 11:49:34 -0000

That happened last night with Jessica's story in the WSJ about Facebook's changes

It was behind the pay wall and even though I have a paid account with WSJ, I didn't want to bother with the login and two clicks it took

I just went to one of the facebook blogs and got the story that way

Re: Celebrating Aggregation

Michael Lewkowitz — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 11:36:08 -0000

not that i've found yet. we're working on it and I'm sure there are (or soon
will be) others...

Re: Celebrating Aggregation

fredwilson — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 11:27:00 -0000

thanks

Re: Celebrating Aggregation

fredwilson — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 11:26:54 -0000

Is there an example of a post aggregator based on personal apis, micro-messages, and in-line tags?

I want to experience this

It sounds directionally correct to me