I think that 2005 will be the year that News becomes the next big craze to take over the Internet.

When I say "News" I don't necessarily mean newspapers, or Reuters, or what's going on in Washington D.C. What I mean is the delivery of new information that matches a user's specifications.

RSS and Atom newsfeeds are great examples. But an even better example are news matching services that can comb through thousands of newsfeeds and pull out headlines where a specific keyword is matched.

PubSub.com is a perfect example of this. It monitors tens of thousands of newsfeeds from all of the popular news outlets like Reuters, Yahoo, PRNewswire, ESPN, and thousands of blogs big and small. A user can create a customized newsfeed by entering a keyword or phrase, and PubSub builds a RSS newsfeed for you. You can enter that newsfeed into your favorite newsreader and have pertinent news and information delivered to you.

I think that is what's going to become the next biggest thing on the Internet. Yahoo already has something like this, but is limited to only what is published on Yahoo.

Soon every website will publish a newsfeed and will seek to have their feeds indexed by these matching services. He who owns the most popular matching service will control the Internet, just as Google and Yahoo controls it right now.

As it stands right now, when people sit down in front of their computers in the morning, they usually start out by going online and reading the news on their customized Yahoo or MSN page. But even though Yahoo currently allows users to include RSS content on their MyYahoo page, Yahoo still does not allow users to create customized feeds in the way that PubSub does.

Eventually this will change and Yahoo will offer that feature. Eventually, popular e-mail clients like Outlook Express and Eudora will include the ability to track newsfeeds. Hence, the first thing that people do online will be to review the latest news delivered via RSS.

Instead of websites relying on search engines to get most of their traffic, newsfeeds are going to drive most of the traffic. Search engines will still drive plenty of traffic, but they won't dominate the referrals like they do now. If you can manage to create a popular newsfeed, your news will be among the first content that people will read in the morning.

Labels: RSS Feeds