Mark Fiore - Aggregating Arianna

News! In-a-nutshell!

In the news today is . . . NEWS!

Multimillionaire Media Maven Arianna's "Huffington Post" is now a cool three-hundred and fifteen million dollars richer!

This journalista's jackpot is all thanks to the advent of . . .  "Aggregation," or, "look, here's some stuff I found on the web!"

Why pay for journalists to work when the work of journalists can pay you!

If only they would've thought of this sooner!

Aggregopolis was a success!  As aggregation was the new key to big bucks!

Merger upon merger and links upon links until new aggregators began to aggregate aggregators!

Website A used content from site B in exchange for B getting eyeballs from A.

Soon B realized it could do the same thing and gathered from site C!

But C was no dummy, and soon A through Z all did the same thing, as aggregation abounded, links were linked, and exposure exposed!

Until one day, little Tommy was at school researching a report on "Journalism and Democracy."

Tommy turned to the web, clicked, and found . . .

An aggregate of links linking to nothing but aggregators' links of each other's aggregated links!

Good night, Little Timmy, and . . .

good link!

[now a few characters for you to choose from]

Arianna:  Fabulous, dahrling.

Ernie Pyle:  Ernie Pyle here, reporting from . . . my study, where I just discovered some neat links on the war and did a bang-up job of Search Engine Optimization!

Robert Capa:  And I just snapped some Jim Dandy screen-shots of this AP photo collection of war-torn Europe!

News kid:  Extra!  Extra!  Give us your work for free and we'll make millions!  Blog all about it!