"So many Web readers frequented sites such as Feed, Word, Suck and Salon for news and commentary that when they downsized or closed, everybody noticed. Hip and immediate though they were, those sites were still basically magazines, with paid contributors writing regular articles in a more-or-less distinctive editorial voice....

But, in fact, another kind of intellectual-content site has survived, one that makes much fuller use of the Web's unique structure. And the new model is flourishing.

The Web has always attracted a sizable minority of literate dissenters, interested in more than Limp Bizkit MP3s and streaming video-porn clips. While institutionally supported sites such as Slate (Microsoft), the Atlantic Online (Atlantic Monthly), and Brookings.org (Brooking Institution) remain important stopovers, they more and more feel peripheral to the main attractions.

Instead of self-contained essays, the Web's new intellectual hothouses offer diverse networks of opinion, and active participation. Reader power is where the Web really comes into its own.

Plastic, Slashdot and Metafilter are three sites where users determine both the news and the spin. Users, including loyal bands of regulars, post links to articles found elsewhere on the Web, write subjective introductions and invite commentary. Discussions range from New York police brutality to the antics of rap-metal behemoth Kid Rock, with sources from the Wall Street Journal editorial page to Annette Funicello fan sites.

As Neil Morton of Shift magazine recently wrote on-line, 'With the Net, now we go and find the news; the news doesn't get selected for us by editors and writers. We go out and discuss various viewpoints on political events in threads and discussion boards rather than having them dictated to us by op-ed pages with their own agenda....'

The Internet, [David] Weinberger says, 'is unleashing our natural desire to find other people interested in the same things as we are, our group-forming tendencies. The Internet has long passed the point of being a gigantic on-line library where we can track down content that matters to us. [It] is a conversation....'

But if you can handle the pace, the rewards are well worth it." [The Globe and Mail, via this particular weblog...]

Emphasis above is mine. If you look closely, you'll see that the glue holding these ideas together is news aggregation, whether its done manually on collaborative sites like Slashdot and MetaFilter, or through RSS news aggregators. I just realized that I'm subscribed to 136 news feeds, which is about 100 more sites than I was trying to monitor on my own in what could only be described as a "haphazard" fashion pre-Radio. In fact, the flow and conversation we're seeing with blogs wouldn't be so dramatic if it wasn't for news aggregators because it wouldn't be possible.

While these are indeed conversations that we are actively seeking, they're built on the shifted reality of aggregators. Aggregators are the ultimate in "information shifting" because there are two filters that narrowcast the amount of information that comes to you. The first is the subscription itself, e.g. I don't have to manually visit 136 sites every day, something I could never realistically do. The second is the aggregation in one place, specifically a web page because email would be too overwhelming. I've shifted 136 sites to where I want to receive information of my choosing. That is the ultimate in "reader power."

"Friday is a Java front-end for viewing news aggregation sites and site syndication feeds on mobile devices, like phones and PDAs. Friday supports the Syndic8 news aggregation site. In the near future, it will support others, such as Meerkat and NewsIsFree." [via Content Syndication with XML and RSS]

This is pretty big news to my mind, because it's the next piece of the puzzle for shifting RSS news aggregators to make them portable. In the future, when we're bathed in always-on, wireless access to the internet, we'll use our customized aggregators to deliver the information that we've personally knighted to be aggregator-worthy.

Maybe you'll see a full-blown aggregator on your OQO, but maybe you view a subset of feeds that you've tagged as high priority and those appear on your phone because you need to see updated information as it comes in. Maybe it's your organization's intranet feed, your customers' feeds, your local newspaper's headlines, or just your daughter's blog. It's your aggregator, so you choose what's important. But portability (both mobility and interoperability) makes that happen.

"Radio's RSS writer is now user-extensible. The RSS writer in Radio is now officially user-extensible. 'Before generating the RSS, we check user.radio.callbacks.writeRssFile,' Dave writes today. Excellent. This will open the floodgates for all sorts of useful metadata experimentation. We'll see Radio UserLand sites emitting RSS 1.0, and others extending RSS .9x. It's not the format that matters to me, it's the experimentation. ... [Jon's Radio] 

This is brilliant news.  Ordinary Radio users like me can now experiment with tagging topical categories of posts related to 'official' court filings (such as opinions), court rules, and FAQs.   Enabling an end user to sort, filter or interpret by topical content.

One Small Example:  A lawyer in New Orleans, is watching the progress of asbestos mass litigation in the courts of Louisiana, becomes aware that very similar issues involving medical monitoring and asbestos mass litigation are pending before the West Virginia Supreme Court.  If the WV court has an XML feed for recent opinions (which we do), the lawyer in New Orleans could subscribe to that feed and watch for orders and opinions regarding asbestos mass litigation.  Understandably, however, the lawyer in New Orleans may not want to read all of the posts about another jurisdiction's opinions - only those concerning limited issues.  With this new feature, the lawyer in New Orleans can target the request, saving bandwidth and precious screen time." [Rory Perry's Radio Weblog]

I don't pretend to understand exactly what all of this means, but I can tell this is a Martha Stewart Good Thing. In fact, I suspect this may somehow solve my RSS truncation issue, but I'll have to wait for more informed minds to weigh in on this one.

What I do see as the bigger issue is that this provides a path for further news aggregator development in Radio. I'm not knowledgeable enough to know what it means for RSS news aggregation in general, but I believe quite strongly that some form of aggregation will become part of our everyday information lives in the future, so I welcome any and all roads that lead to that day.