Aggregating The Edge

How can a company re-use blog content to build a new and radical business?

One of the major trends for this year will be start-ups attempting to capitalise on the massive growth in user-generated content by aggregating and re-distributing it. We call it “aggregating the edge.”

“The edge” is Internet industry jargon for the proliferation of blog posts, reviews, classified ads, photographs, podcasts, videos and more that is constantly being created by individual users. The centre could be any site that aggregates some of this.

But how is it possible to build a business re-using this kind of content? Three new companies reveal the opportunities.

iNods

Their description: “iNods is a pre-shopping research engine for you to find reviews and advice about the products, services, and other things you are looking to buy.” The service launched in January, aiming to index reviews from both online mass media (such as newspaper web sites) and individual blogs. Although iNods has its own search engine that is constantly looking for reviews, blog owners who write reviews can also submit their blogs to the site to ensure they’re indexed. iNods claims that it “presents a strong channel to own your review content and benefit by drawing traffic to your website or blog and generating an advertising income stream” (eg from Google or affiliate ads).

Reevoo

Similarly, Reevoo.com is a UK-based site “where you can read and share reviews before you buy. We have thousands of reviews on electrical products, collected from confirmed purchasers (our emphasis) of major uk retailers and from other sites across the web.”

edgeio

This is an even more ambitious project that is taking aim at the classified advertising market and is due to launch in late February or March. It’s the latest venture from serial entrepreneur Keith Teare (British readers will remember him as a founder of ISP Easynet and the Cyberia cyber café). As with iNods, this service will encourage people to put up classifieds in their own blogs and categorise or tag them so that edgeio can easily find and display them for potential buyers to search through.

Both services share a number of characteristics. As Keith Teare points out, the aggregator is not a destination site that hosts content, but an index to content. In theory, this should give it an advantage over existing rivals such as the classified ads site Craigslist, because an index can always find more content than a site that has to attract users to enter the data. It can also focus on organising the index to give its users a more effective search tool: edgeio has a zoomable map for displaying ads by locality and also collects information about the sellers, such as their eBay reputation.

iNods and edgeio push traffic towards individuals’ blogs, making it possible for the blog owners to make money, while encouraging them to use microformats or structured blogging in their blog posts to make them easier to search. (See previous issues of Internet Futures on how structured content will encourage Mass Criticism.) And both of them are rivalling not only traditional media, such as newspapers, but also older web sites that host their own, centralised content. iNods competes with epinions.com, while edgeio will take on eBay and Craigslist.

However, there are even more radical opportunities in aggregating edge content. A proposed service by Toshiba would enable a shopper to photograph a product’s bar code, send it to a review aggregator and immediately receive reviews of the product back on the mobile. Dr Brian Whitman at MIT has created a piece of software, Echo Nest, that can search blogs for what people are saying about a particular song and use the information to predict the song’s sales. He claims that he has accurately forecast the US top 10 for several weeks.

As the number of people creating their own content online continues to rise, there will be even more opportunities for building new - and potentially disruptive - aggregation and analysis services.

References

The Toshiba review service

MIT’s Echo Nest software

Tags iNods | Reevoo | edgeio

Comments

[Tom Foremski]

Everybody wants content for free. This assumes that the value of the content is in its aggregation. That is only true while there is not much (AdSense) of a business model for content. But when there is--content will be increasingly glued down and the aggregators will be in trouble.
All those links harvested by the aggregators had better point to something useful or they are pointless. The "useful" will, eventually, be in control, imho.

[Colin Donald]

Thanks for the comment, Tom.

Interestingly, the Structured Blogging mailing list has recently been discussing this kind of issue - "Why should I make it easier for someone else to aggregate my content if I'm not making any money out of it?"

There clearly needs to be some kind of balance between original content production and aggregation so that both sides can benefit financially.