Two types of online information services have, until now,
dominated the market fornews and corporate information. Deep
archives provided by companies such as Factivaand LexisNexis, and
real-time newswires and stock information offered by agencies
suchas Reuters and Bloomberg.
Between these two traditional models a third, and strikingly
different, model has nowemerged – Internet aggregation. Its
starting point is the vast sea of online informationavailable. The
information resources accessible to these new aggregators are
alreadylarge, are growing at a phenomenal rate and are highly
diverse. They range fromtraditional news and media organizations
right through to what might be termedpersonal or informal
publishers.
Weblogs and Bulletin Boards, for example, are now providing
insights into consumeropinion as well as breaking news that is
sometimes only later picked up by mainstreammedia. They also offer
discussion, unsolicited opinions and analysis that can be vital
forcompanies seeking to manage their reputations or protect their
brands.Even though Internet search engines have improved in recent
years, the infrequency oftheir indexing - which can be measured in
weeks rather than hours - is not generallysuited to current
awareness services and breaking news. Additionally, the
typicalcorporation has neither the time nor the resource itself to
manually capture all theuseful information available to it. Asking
well-paid executives to spend hours during theirworking day
trawling Internet sites is not a good use of their time.
When this model began in the late 1990’s, it suffered from both
a lack of available data and from the dubious quality of some of
the information aggregated. Much news and corporate information
thatwas previously restricted to paid-for, premium, services have
now migrated to the free (or at least low-priced) Internet.