Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 has a great post about how newspapers can work with aggregators and the distributed ecosystem of the Web, instead of just moaning about how Google and Yahoo are stealing their business, as Tribune owner Sam Zell and others like to do from time to time. Scott nails it when he says that:

The problem that newspapers and other traditional media brands have is that they still see branding as a function of controlling the distribution channel, rather than branding each unit of content that must now live and survive on its own in a disaggregated online media ecosystem.

Using aggregators and search wisely can make a big difference, Scott points out, using the New York Times “Topics” pages as an example. Putting together pages of content that match what people are searching for is a good way of making the rest of your publishing entity that much more appealing. And Scott notes that this works for his site as well.

Publishing 2.0 gets 73% of its traffic from search and referring sites, which include aggregators like Techmeme. Some of my content is also syndicated in full text on Seeking Alpha, Yahoo, and Digital Media Wire (with links back to the site, which yield significant traffic) — this is anathema to the traditional media mindset.

But the result, he says, is that his RSS and email subscriptions keep growing, and so is his brand — by effectively leveraging search, and by giving his content away.

There are a few different threads weaving through the blogosphere related to the evolution of media — not just TV but all different kinds of content. One thread is the Bear Stearns report by Spencer Wang, in which he looks at how the TV content business is changing, and the rise of “user-generated content.” You can tune into a conference call, or scroll through a PDF version of his presentation on what Om Malik calls the “fat belly” of the Long Tail.

One of the interesting points to me was that 75 per cent of the top 20 videos on YouTube on one particular day were “user-generated content” of some kind, which goes against the standard argument from people like Mark Cuban and Nick Carr that the majority of popular videos on YouTube and other sites are copyright violations. As Rafat Ali at PaidContent succinctly puts it, the point of the presentation is that “aggregation and context” are the key.

That leads to another thread, which came up while reading Steve Rubel’s Micropersuasion, where he pointed to a new Christmas gadget-shopping hub put together by Federated Media and Best Buy. The site has gadget reviews written by bloggers for half a dozen different websites, including Uncrate, Oh Gizmo, Gadgetopia and PVR Blog. It’s not clear whether the reviews were written specifically for the site, or are taken from the participating blogs, but it’s a pretty smart idea.

Then there’s the New York Times story about Philips sponsoring the entire newscast of NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams. Obviously that isn’t new media, but it’s an interesting move by Philips to cut through the clutter of TV advertising, as Techdirt notes — just as Best Buy is trying to cut through the clutter of Web advertising. In other words, aggregation and context.

Mike Davidson, the CEO of Newsvine — a kind of news aggregator/blog hub — has a nice post up on his site reacting to some of the recent commentary about Gather.com, to which Newsvine has been compared by many (including me in this post) . Rather than take any delight in a competitor getting weak early reviews — for the record, I think it still has potential — Mike makes a few good points in his post, entitled “The Proof Is In The People.”

Among other things, he says that being a media darling isn’t necessarily an indicator of future success, and that many great things were originally greeted with skepticism. Mike also points out that “an entrepreneur who always thinks along the lines of everyone else will produce a product or service just like everyone else’s. That’s usually a bad thing.” And he is right. He also says that the Newsvine team is going to keep their heads down and “keep learning from our users and admitting we only know half of what we think we know. The moment you think you understand everything about the market you’re entering is the moment you exit it.”

Words of wisdom, Mike. And for what it’s worth, I like the service a lot (I’m beta testing). I haven’t been seeding as much as I probably should be, but I do like it — particularly the commenting. Not sure about the live chatting, but time will tell.

Hey, who said blogging wasn’t cool — after all, how often do you get to use cool terms like “aggregator” and “splog?” Those terms have come up recently because Om Malik and a couple of other A-list bloggers have raised the issue of whether a new site called Top 10 Sources is doing something unsavoury or not. The site essentially pulls together the RSS feeds from the 10 blogs it feels are leaders in a particular field.

Om and Mike Rundle of BusinessLogs (a 9rules blog) aren’t saying Top 10 Sources is a “splog” or that the site is plagiarizing their content. But they have raised the question of whether aggregating their feeds — without asking first — is stepping over the bounds of civilized behaviour, particularly when some of the pages include the full post, not just an excerpt. Adam Green of Darwinianweb has also written about this thorny issue.

But what makes this even more interesting is that it turns out that Top 10 Sources is backed, in part, by John Palfrey — who happens to not only be a law professor, but the executive director of the prestigious Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, where Dave Winer (one of the inventors of RSS) is a fellow. In other words, not your run-of-the-mill aggregator, let alone a splogger.

Professor Palfrey, as it turns out (thanks to Adam Green for the links) has not only thought long and hard about this issue, he wrote about it on his blog as far back as 2003, when he wondered whether the increasing interest in RSS feeds would lead to just this kind of debate. As he notes, the attempt to exercise too much control over one’s feed can become — if taken to the extreme — the same kind of desire for control that the record industry has tried to exert by suing downloaders. However, he does admit that maybe full feeds isn’t the right way to go.

An interesting debate, that’s for sure. For the record, I think Top 10 Sources is doing something that makes sense, it isn’t selling ads all around everyone’s content, and therefore I would put it in pretty much the same camp as Google News. Let a thousand aggregators bloom.