Infosential is Tim Duckett and Wayne Robinson. They're a small UK tech consulting concern focusing on usages of social software in business. Vanilla enough.
They're workflow for helping a busy exec stay on top of the tech blogosphere is quite interesting. They use what I call watch engines (PubSub, Google Alerts) to track topics of interest to their client as an incoming stream. Then they sift and edit the material to construct short spoken summaries recorded in MP3s. The summaries are then shipped as podcasts, using RSS, through an aggregator, into the overwhelmed execs iPod shuffle. Slick.
Now this strikes me as a decent alternative business model for aggregation and podcasting. Alternative in the sense that it really doesn't need advertising. As long as you're not looking for megabucks success, subscriptions could support a decent business I think.
And for you wankers thinking about how to automate the human voice out of the loop, give it up. It's probably easier to outsource the problem to India.
Hat tip to Bob Wyman, who rightly notes the very real small scale, social issues a busy exec faces: on airplanes all the time, can't slog paper, often disconnected, need for easy, cheap tech, etc. etc.
Oh yeah, and more ammo, competitive intelligence, for why this aggregation stuff is important.