A colleague forwarded me a fantastic article from Ad Age "It's Web 3.0, and Someone Else's Content is King". The article is worth a read for anyone in the content business. The author, Matthew Creamer, suggests that Web 3.0 will be about monetizing the web's openness and points to examples in the news business of websites aggregating other people's content for profit. Are content aggregators in fact growing in popularity? The author cites Michael Wolff of Newser: "The space is heating up". According to internet usage data, is it?

New York - TechPresident.com, a group blog on the use of the Web by presidential candidates, announced on Monday that it has partnered with the editorial board of The New York Times and MSNBC.com on 10Question.com, a video forum that will solicit video questions from users and responses in video form from candidates. Users can post question videos to all candidates on sites including YouTube, MySpace, Yahoo and Blip.tv tagged as "10Questions." The public will then vote on the ten best questions, with the NYTimes.com opinion page and MSNBC.com directing users to the videos, and candidates will have four weeks to submit video responses to those questions.

Standing out for your online news offering is rapidly becoming almost impossible for publishers.  After all, as we each get smarter about using RSS feeds to only get the content we want, the old "news portal" sites of several years ago are becoming less and less important.