Recreating your own Google News with del.icio.us

I've been thinking a lot about how niche media players can take advantage of the new technologies to aggregate links intelligently.  The key is to provide links out to the world that make sense not just lots of links that sometimes make sense and sometimes don't.  Google News is proving that this can be done with elaborate algorhythms and proprietary code.  I'm certain that there are ways to provide highly relevant links without a lot of custom development.

I don't know if it was Simon Waldman or Jeff Jarvis who first pointed out the Hypergene MediaBlog delicious bookmarks feed.  Regardless, I find the collection of bookmarks from Chris Willis and Shayne Bowman a daily must-read.  I then started thinking it would be smart to add this set of links to the Media section of The Industry Standard web site.  Suddenly, it occurred to me that this might be the way to provide a view to the world for my site's visitors.

In this case, I'm pulling a feed of bookmarks that are being diligently updated by 2 guys who have a smart view of what's happening in the world I want to cover.  I then display the feed on the site in the section where it is relevant. It took me 10 minutes to set this up.

You could either invite your own editorial team to bookmark relevant links for your media property, or you could hire someone to do this.  I'm also starting to think that with some clever methods of pulling data out of delicious you could build an automated aggregation system that pulls the right kinds of links for whatever you want to cover.

Of course, whether or not your company is comfortable with aggregation is a question you'll have to wrestle with until everyone gives up and says let's try it.  But it might be easier to sell management on the idea of aggregation when you can show highly targeted and relevant results like this. 

I'm starting to wonder if I could build a brand focused on a topic area that consists primarily of an intelligent and useful collection of bookmarks.  Then, add a wiki database of the products, companies, or people that your brand serves which your customers could help you build.  Finally, hire 1 or 2 bloggers to faciliate conversation and draw in new customers.  Hmm...that seems frighteningly easy.  Is anyone doing this?

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