We’re heading out to the Online News Association Conference in San Francisco. We’re super excited that we’re exhibiting this year! If you are headed out to ONA09 too, come check out our booth! We’ll have reps there to answer any questions about content aggregation and curation or set you up with a free trial.

We’ll also be following the #ONA09 conversation on Twitter with our @onespot account.

See you at ONA09!

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There is only two days left to vote on our SXSW panels (also known as #sxsw). Voting ends Friday, September 4th! Get those votes in to ensure SXSWi rocks this year!

Voting is super easy: start voting for and commenting on our panels!

We have panels ranging from Artificial Intelligence to Twitter Power to the great Newspapers vs. Content Aggregators Fight Night!

Vote now!

If you have a panel in contention, let us know! @ reply us on our twitter accounts and we’ll vote for you too! Our Twitter accounts are @onespot, @onespot_law, @onespot_health, and @onespot_fashion.

So get out (on your computer) and vote! Voting ends September 4th!

See you at SXSW 2010 and thanks for your support!

As voting for panels continue, we’ll focus on one of our panels every day. Today, it’s a technology and content panel: Newspapers vs. Content Aggregators: Fight Night! (You know you want to see what goes down between big media and aggregators!)

Panel Description

In the red corner, boasting over 200 years of experience and $38 Billion yearly revenue: the newspaper industry. In the blue corner, the rookie packing a major punch: the content aggregator. Called the “tech tapeworms” of the Internet, content aggregators have become the frienemies of newspapers. Round 1… Fight!

Possible Panelists

Matt Cohen, CEO of OneSpot

Guy Kawasaki – Alltop

    Tony Conrad – CEO, Sphere

Senior Representative – Newscorp

Senior Representative – NYTimes

Senior Representative – Google (the “original tech tapeworm”)

Questions this panel will answer

   1. What is “content aggregation”? 
   2. Why do newspapers dislike content aggregators? 
   3. Why do newspapers need content aggregators? 
   4. Do content aggregators need newspapers to survive? 
   5. Fair use: what constitutes as just ‘linking to’ versus ‘parasitic’ infringement? 
   6. What does the new symbiotic business model look like? 
   7. Who should be paying who: content aggregators for content or newspapers for offsite promotion? 
   8. How does content aggregation help large and small publishers tap into the long tail? 
   9. What does the NYT and Blogrunner relationship look like pre- and post-acquisition? 
  10. Why can’t we all just get along?

VOTE FOR THIS PANEL

We are so excited to plan this panel and the other 6 we have submitted. We hope you like them enough to vote and attend! Voting ends September 4th!

See you at SXSW 2010 and thanks for your support!

The working title for this post was “The Mouse That Roared,” a riff on the mascot of ESPN’s majority owner, Disney. But there’s nothing mouse-like about ESPN. And, unlike the film of the same title, ESPN isn’t marching on newspapers’ turf with white flags at the ready. The 30-year-old network calls itself the “Worldwide Leader in Sports,” a nearly irrefutable claim when one tallies the Borg-like reach of its cable channels, local radio affiliates, blogs, international sites and more.

Accordingly, tremors from Sunday’s news that ESPN is adding local sports coverage – with plans to go hyper-local (think softball leagues) – have rippled well beyond editors’ offices. With local readers and ad dollars in the crosshairs of sports media’s biggest, best-funded promotional howitzer, this is a vastly bigger worry for newspapers than Google News’ parasitical attributes.

Why? Consider this stat from the Times story: “In less than three months, ESPN Chicago has become the city’s top sports site, attracting about 590,000 unique visitors in June… Second place went to the Tribune’s online sports section with 455,000 unique visitors.”

What’s amazing is not that it happened, it’s the velocity with which it happened. The Tribune has been the authority on Chicago sports for 162 years; ESPN only needed three months to undo that.

And it’s not just the sports desk that should be worried. Last month, the Huffington Post announced its plans to expand into local news. Resistance is futile.

Of course, competition from ESPN, HuffPo and other national outlets isn’t news to newspapers, which have traditionally relied on the defense that national outlets lack the well-sourced local beat reporters to compete head to head.

Until now,as Dan Shanoff notes:

“Here’s an unintentionally funny quote from LA Times sports associate editor Randy Harvey: ‘It would be foolish to underestimate ESPN, but it comes down to resources. I don’t see them being able to replicate what we do.’

“Do what, Randy? Cut your hockey coverage? Let marquee columnists like JA Adande leave for…oh, let’s see, ESPN.com? … How about the way Harvey has let Bill Plaschke become more TV personality than newspaper columnist — on…ESPN? (Again: ESPNLA will have Plaschke video from Around the Horn. What’s LATimes.com got?)”

Indeed, ESPN has been poaching talent from local papers for years, a trend exacerbated by local newsrooms’ collapsing budgets. Now, it appears, these chickens have come home to roost.

Fortunately for newspapers, this is a war that can be waged on the cheap. According to the Times article, ESPN primarily will use existing resources and need only 15 new staff members to run the Dallas, Los Angeles and New York properties.

How is going local such a high-leverage move for ESPN, HuffPo, et al? In a word, aggregation. Check out ESPN’s Rumor Central pages, where ESPN culls non-ESPN content by topic area, bundles it with internally-generated content, and charges its “Insiders” subscribers for access. Per Shanoff:

“As quickly as a good nugget can be reported by someone like the Times, a quick-acting (and inexpensive) ESPNLA intern (or low-paid editor) can have it on the ESPNLA site.”

Actually, it can be more efficient, scalable and effective than that. Just ask OneSpot clients like the Wall Street Journal, the Houston Chronicle, the San Francisco Chronicle or others. Instead of relying solely on the selection of a single editor, blogger or intern, these organizations tap into the hive mind of thousands of editors, bloggers, Twitterers and others who link to the best of the web. The key is quality content aggregation with smart curation to select the best of the best. And, as ESPN has proven, quality, curated content can also be monetized. Let us show you how.

ESPN’s blitzkrieg into local markets may resemble Amazon.com’s takeover of so many retail categories. Both are category-killer brands executing ruthlessly clever online strategies while incumbents, beholden to brick-and-mortar interests and budgets, struggle to keep up. But ESPN is winning by outsmarting, rather than outspending. With nimbleness and creativity, newspapers can fight fire with fire.

There’s a new issue of the Health Spotlight: the biweekly email newsletter highlighting the best health stories from around the web, found automatically by OneSpot from over 500,000 different sources.

This issue’s stories include:

Want Tylenol? You May Need Rx As 23 states get even fatter, heavy costs loom Pundits Ponder Whether Palin Had Postpartum Depression Vegetarians ‘avoid more cancers’

To read these stories and more, check out our newsletter: Health Spotlight

Not yet subscribed? Sign up now to Get the Spotlight for our Health, Fashion, Law, or Social Media Marketing Newsletters.

With the democratization of content production tools, there are so many content producers posting to the web. The supply of content is increasing exponentially. It becomes impossible to consume it all, just as it becomes impossible to keep up with the demand of content production. When I talk about OneSpot, our content curation tool, and presenting the best of the Web to a target audience, the process comes down to 3 steps: aggregate, filter, and prioritize.

Aggregate: Ag”gre*gate, v. To bring together; to collect into a mass or sum. (Websters)

The first step to presenting third party content is to collect it. Like collecting toy cars as a kid, you grabbed as many as you possibly could find because you want the most cars in your toy box. At this point, there is no regard for toy brand, car make or model, scale, or even the condition of the toy. You just want quantity.

Filter: Fil”ter, v. To remove by passing through a filter: filter out impurities. (American Heritage)

The next step to presenting the aggregated content is to filter. Now, take those toy cars and remove broken ones, different scaled models, unwanted colors, different models, or even cars you simply don’t like. Suddenly, your car collection is more focused and more representative of your tastes and interests. Now, you are looking more for quality.

Prioritize: prī-ôr’ĭ-tīz’, v. To arrange or deal with in order of importance. (American Heritage)

The final step to presenting this new filtered, aggregated content is to prioritize. Imagine you can only present your top 20 cars to your friends. After all, you don’t want to show them cars they would not be interested in. So you pick the most pristine, the top of the line models, the most special of your cars to show off. You are giving your friends the best experience by showing the best of the cars you have collected. Now, it is all about quality.

Now imagine this scenario online, utilizing industrial strength technology: you collect every relevant story in your subject area, remove the less relevant, lower quality stories, and display only the best of the best to your audience. Now, you are curating the best of the web and serving your audience. When I talk about OneSpot, I tell people they are curating the best of the Web. That’s because this content aggregation, filtration, and prioritization is happening behind the scenes, without you having to tinker and toil over an overly technical system. Using technology, it becomes simple to sift through the mass amounts of online content available. OneSpot presents a simple Editor Dashboard to make picking the most relevant, targeted, high quality stories as easy as checking email. By aggregating, filtering, and prioritizing, you are ensuring your audience’s experience is as special and valuable as it can be.

Teaching the Mind to Treat Insomnia Posted 3 minutes ago via WebMD Health

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OneSpot allows anyone to discover, curate, and share the best of the web for their audience, no matter their topic. A few weeks ago, we launched Curated for You: sites focused on a single topic allowing you to read, use, and customize OneSpot.

We have now added 2 new topics, ready for reading, using, and customizing: Health and Fashion.

On our Curated for You sites, you can read it, use it, or customize it:

Read it! Stay on top of the latest news. Read headlines, subscribe to the newsletter or RSS feed, or follow us on Twitter.

Use it! Grab the news widget for your site or blog and start delivering the best content to your audience today!

Customize it! Create your own OneSpot, no matter your topic. Choose your own topic, sources, stories, and presentation. Try OneSpot free for 30 days.

We are excited to add these two topics, Health and Fashion. Interested in a different topic? Suggest a topic for us to demo next or build your own OneSpot.

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It makes perfect sense for businesses to get into the business of blogging, and lots of them do. Technorati’s 2008 State of the Blogosphere reported there are 7.4 million active blogs (active being at least one new post in the last 120 days), and 12% of their respondents identified themselves as corporate bloggers. And the blogosphere continues to grow in leaps and bounds. As I submit this post, Wordpress’s running ticker reports a staggering 201,242 active blogs on its platform alone. (When I started writing this post, that number was 194,795.) If Technorati’s 12% holds true with this group, it suggests OneSpot joined about 24,000 other businesses when we launched our Wordpress-powered blog last month. Blogging is relatively inexpensive to set up and maintain, so it is no surprise that business blogging has increased during this economic downturn. You don’t have to buy any software to get started, it takes minutes to implement, and the tools are so easy that anyone can learn to use them. Multiple authors can write posts for the same blog, so companies can maintain decent post frequency by distributing the task across members of a team. Add a targeted content aggregation service that allows for your own commentary and selection, and a steady stream of relevant content for your audience takes little time and won’t break the bank. But the fact that it’s cheap and relatively easy isn’t the reason that businesses blog. Whether you’re building a media property, selling products and services online, or simply trying to market your brand, blogging can be a very effective way to grow your business. MerchantCircle, a U.S. social network of local business owners, showed a 190% increase in blogging between January 2008 to January 2009, totalling 15,676 blogs written by merchants on their network. In their study, they also discovered that merchants who wrote one blog received 30% more traffic to their website. Sharon LB of Sharon’s Marketing Missive has put together a great Small Business Blogging Basics guide to help businesses enter the blogosphere. She suggests three reasons that businesses should blog: increase SEO, establish thought leadership and relate to your customers. So how does a crazy-busy business blogger (who, by the way, didn’t need another ‘quick task’ on her to-do list) have any hope of succeeding? Lots of folks have lots of ideas about this, but in my opinion it comes down to 3 things: Focus on your customer, not your wares. The great business blogs do more than list product announcements and press releases. They show how well a business understands its customers. Whole Foods excels at this. One of my favorite Whole Foods posts this week has Scott Simons showing me how to cook and prepare a halibut with roasted tomato, garlic and olive relish. The picture and the video make my mouth water, and I learn something new about how to cook one of my favorite kinds of fish. And in the midst of a recent salmonella peanut recall, they also blog about every recalled product that is sold in any of their stores to ensure the safety and well-being of their customers. Their blog does more than push groceries — it teaches me things I want to know. Give them something useful. I appreciate blogs that post ‘really good stuff’ that helps me in my personal and professional life. Bazaarvoice does a great job with their blog overall, but this week’s post about their research with JupiterResearch and Rich Relevance will be particularly useful to retailers and manufacturers who are trying to win business in a tough economy. It makes a great case for their solutions by giving its readers new information that will help them address current business challenges.

Have a unique perspective. The blogs that I spend the most time on are the ones that have a clear and unique point of view. Huffington Post is the standard in this category, but my latest favorite example of a unique blogging perspective is Jessica Hagy’s Indexed. As a reader, her blog makes you want to buy her book because her stuff is like nothing you’ve ever seen before. Her distinctive content also makes me read more/return more when I should be doing other things.

The OneSpot team is relatively new to the blogosphere. But we know that maintaining a quality blog will help us serve and understand our customers more, be a place to deliver ‘good stuff’ to online publishers of all shapes and sizes, and provide a platform to express our own perspective about the importance of content curation for every business. Take a minute to share some of your favorite business blogs with us — we’d love to learn from you.

Everyone, including myself, is running on all cylinders these days, trying to frequently post the best possible content for our sites. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to have another able body to work with and take some of the pressure off, allowing time to make sure each original piece is the best it could possibly be? Most of the time, to get more stories, you need more people, more journalists. Major media publishers know how much a reporter costs. Perhaps the editors are not as aware, but the accounting team certainly knows how much it costs to support a single writer. I read this great post on ZDNet called “Let’s talk about the economics of great journalism” outlining how expensive a reporter can be. The fully loaded cost of a great reporter doing great work, then, falls somewhere in the $180,000 range:

  $130,000 salary and benefits
  $4,800 a year in subscriptions and other information sources
  $30,000 a year in travel
  $15,000 a year in legal and insurance coverage
  $179,800 total, and that’s before the cost of IT, telecom and office space

$180K. I know that’s more than I make. Granted, this is likely a celebrity journalist with a recognizable name and multiple awards. Most local journalists might rake in around $40-60K (not including benefits). So let’s say that you hire a journalist (and don’t pay them benefits… we’re in a recession, after all). He/she cranks out an average 2 high quality stories a day for you, or 730 stories a year. This means that each story costs you around $50-80. Wouldn’t you like to get paid that much for each blog post (or maybe you do… email me!) So hiring another body to get more stories is probably out of the question (unless you are a millionaire blogger… again, email me!) Syndicated content is now an option, as it is much less expensive than an employee. You might catch some dollar deals, and some articles may cost hundreds or thousands (depending on your topic), but let’s use the NYTimes a la carte price for the sake of argument: $3.95 per story. At only 2 articles per day, you pay over $2800 per year. A bargain compared to adding a reporter, but it seems a little high for 2 articles per day. Then there is OneSpot. Content aggregation overall will get you more articles, but not the same quality you would get from hiring a reporter or selecting syndicated content yourself. OneSpot is content curation, which allows you to have that element of hand selection and editorial voice, but with lots of stories. Your site gets titles and summaries of targeted stories that link to the original story. As Chris Brogan, ChrisBrogan.com, says: “Links tell Google what is important… enough pointers from lots of sites saying similar things [improves SEO].” You become a part of your Web community, not just a site that copies and pastes a story (more on linking in a later post). You can also have interactive discussion pages that encourage audience participation. You can even add your own comments to spark discussion and add your voice. Plus, you save time scouring the Web for stories. Depending on your topic, you may average 50 articles a day. That’s over 18,000 articles a year. At the current price point, that makes each article less than 10 cents. I think that sounds more reasonable. Then again, I’m not a millionaire blogger…

In the first part of this post, I began the discussion of a new style of media: sites that have some original content, but primarily picked and linked to the best content from around the web for their audience.

The primary goal of any site is to serve its audience.
Curation is the aggregation, filtering, and prioritization of content for a targeted audience, with context and editorial voice.
It’s extremely hard to make the best content on the Web.
Great content is subjective and will be evaluated by your audience.
There’s not much use in creating the 4th best piece of content on something.

Now that you have had time to think over the first 5 rules, the remainder of the “top 10″:

If you can’t create the best content for your audience, link to someone who does. It’s all about what serves your audience best. Restated, this is Jarvis’ New Rule: Cover what you do best. Link to the rest. Scott Karp calls this link journalism. If you focus on what your audience would be most interested in — regardless of whether or not you created it — and succeed, nobody can possibly compete with you.
Curation is usually more efficient than creation. Creating great original content is typically time-consuming, expensive, and requires expert knowledge of your audience. Finding content for your audience and adding editorial voice is often just as useful (if not more), and takes a fraction of the time.
It’s not cost-effective to build a definitive site without curation. It’s just too expensive to create the volume of content yourself that you need to keep your audience coming back frequently and spending lots of time on your site. Unless you have the resources to hire an entire staff of writers, it is difficult, if not impossible to build the library of content needed to become authoritative source on your topic, driving traffic and keeping readers on your site. You need frequency and time on site to make money in the new, lower-revenue world of the Web.
Curation is not gatekeeping. Gatekeeping assumes that your audience needs you to decide what’s best for them; that they have no choice but to rely on you for information. Curation assumes that your audience trusts you to find what will interest them; that you’re a reliable and time-saving representative of their interests.
Curation on the Web requires technology. A huge amount of manual labor will go a long way — successful curated sites like Engadget and Gizmodo, created by OneSpot advisor Peter Rojas, were started by dedicated expert editors manually combing through thousands of articles each day to find the best of the Web for their audience — but any approach powered by a lone editor or any small team of humans is bound to miss something when faced with the sheer scale of the Web. As Clay Shirky says: It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure (thanks to Clay for pointing me to the IDC stats in the last post). OneSpot is one of the first platforms specifically built to address this problem, but there are many existing individual tools that are useful as well.
The eleventh rule has yet to be written. Please add your suggestions in the comments below.

Curation on the web is still relatively new and evolving, as is OneSpot — I encourage you to participate in the discussion.