OPEN

I say news. I mean content, but news makes for a better headline.

A while back, whilst "riffing", as they say out here in the blogosphere, on the nature of aggregators for a change I looked askance at Gather. A few others have been looking at the service in recent days and that original post was picked up by Computerworld‘s IT Blogwatch (a mini-aggregation of blog posts, ironically enough).

In that original post I drew some unflattering parallels with Beenz, that flagship of the damned in the dotcom bust, and noted that the original URL was up for sale. That was the angle picked up by Paul  Montgomery’s Tinfinger for a hilarious (really, not many blogs make me laugh out loud) post recounting his own run-in  (pun intended) with Beenz when he was the editor of The Australian‘s IT section back in the day worked on Internet World Australia.

I recount all of this because it illustrates / re-illustrates two things to me:

1. Blog content lives longer than you might think: Gather is topic of the week again because it just picked up US $6 million of VC investment, so that post can come back from the November archive to live again. It is still relevant because it is comment.
2. Connectedness of new media. The main story for me was the march of the aggregators, the link passed through Computerworld as commentary on Gather , then the Beenz hook was enough to spark a memory of severe gastric trauma as an allegory for micropayments for someone else.

: : On the subject of Gather: for what it’s worth, I did register and post an article, but despite email reminders I’ve not really been back. The reason mainly is time. It’s hard enough maintaining my primary blogging habit, without acquiring a secondary push-Aggregator one.