- Google and Yahoo go first among the new forces in news for three reasons. They have boatloads of capital to invest in new ventures and acquisitions. They have strong existing news aggregation products, increasingly able to become the personalized "Daily Me," so long a staple of thinking about the-newspaper-of-the-future. Their principal revenue base is advertising, the lifeblood of newspapers' income.
Until now RSS (really simple syndication) feeds, the standard means for compiling your own news report from multiple sources, required a degree of user sophistication and have displayed content choices in uninviting, super-abridged list form. Neither issue is disappearing overnight, but [Morgan Stanley analyst Mary] Meeker contends that My Yahoo gets a lot closer to real simplicity and also serves a menu of special interests from the content-rich blogosphere.
Look for 2005 to be the year the heat gets turned up on newspapers to get better, and innovate faster online as credible rival versions of the "Daily Me" emerge in the marketplace.
See also "Daily Me is here", "Making sense of the chaos", and "Turning noise to knowledge".
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