Just piecing bits together. Ben Hyde knocks the fetishizing of the long tail. All we know is that it's a jungle out here.
Meanwhile, Greg Linden succinctly encapsulates the core problem with aggregators. People have to do a lot of work filtering out junk.
My bridge between the two is that folks will gravitate to aggregator like tools to keep track of all that niche content. Think of all those sniping tools for eBay.
Here's the rub. If you want to keep an eye on the fringe, is there enough context to make Findory style personalization tools effective? If it ain't linked to, commented on, or subscribed to, how well can you index the content coming from a source? Failing that, the fall back is to have people sift. Back to ground zero.
Oh yeah, and that's only for news or recently changing stuff. Despite certain protestations about content from traditional sources instantaneously becoming fishwrap, it actually does have value long term. We just have to wait for the lens of history to sort out what's what. But our tool builders are thinking little in this direction, as far as I can tell.