Huffington's Golden age

I just love these quotes from Arianna Huffington in response to Rupert Murdoch's attacks on news aggregators

Trying to deny news consumers as wide a range of options and viewpoints as possible seems shortsighted -- and ultimately self-defeating. This is a Golden Age for news consumers who can surf the net, use search engines, access the best stories from around the world, and be able to comment, interact, and form communities. The value of having the world of information at your fingertips is beyond dispute.

and of Murdoch?

"It's the news industry equivalent of "your mama wears army boots!" Although, not quite as persuasive. In most industries, if your customers were leaving in droves, you would try to figure out what to do to get them back. Not in the media. They'd rather accuse aggregators of stealing their content."

I believe in the link economy. it adds value to all producers of content

yes the global economy is fairly grim and the cyclical aspects of our business are biting extremely hard in the face of the structural changes. But the Internet isn’t killing the news business any more than TV killed radio or radio killed the newspaper. Incumbent business leaders in news haven’t been keeping up. Many leaders continue to help push the business into the ditch by wasting “resources” (management speak for talented people) on recycling commodity news. Reader habits are changing and vertically curated views need to be meshed with horizontal read-around ones.

The words of Chris Ahearn, President, Media at Thomson Reuters speaking to Media File.

In a tirade against those businesses who blame aggregation for the mess we are in,he has this to say

Blaming the new leaders or aggregators for disrupting the business of the old leaders, or saber-rattling and threatening to sue are not business strategies – they are personal therapy sessions .

Instead he continues

I believe in the link economy. Please feel free to link to our stories — it adds value to all producers of content. I believe you should play fair and encourage your readers to read-around to what others are producing if you use it and find it interesting.

ht-Martin Stabe

Tweetdeck is more than an aggregator says founder

Iain Dodsworth,the founder of Tweetdeck gives an interview to the folks at Paid Content and sees the device's

business model not just as a real-time tweet aggregator but of the wider web.

He is relying on its continued growth of users to

find the revenue streams that are small now but have potential to scale

but is not keen on advertising.

Personally I hate that, it’s awful. A lot of people have said ‘just put a big banner ad at the top, you’ve got a great big gap there…’ but that’s horrible for the users… We’d end up with a userbase of 10 people and you can’t monetise that.