Pageflakes - an aggregators delight, a publishers nightmare

I've been setting up my pageflakes page in the last few days in a effort to try and bring together my social networking and rss feeds into one interface.

The beauty of pageflakes over other tools like the new Google home page that comes with IE7 or MyYahoo which I have used up until now for my RSS feeds is that there are also widgets for your social networking tools like Facebook, MySpace, GMail and Twitter. These widgets integrate with the sites so that you can update your status and check messages from within Pagefakes. There are a few others like LinkedIn and Plaxo I'm not sure if you can integrate. Then you have all the standards widgets like weather, calendar, calculator that you can also choose to have on your home page.

This level of customisation seems to be becoming the norm with web portals and I imagine many sites will follow the lead of the BBC homepage in making home pages more relevant as customised portals where you can choose what content you want to view and position in on the page.

The concept of pagecasts where you aggregate a chosen selection of content via widgets reflects the new way people can now aggregate content from other services. For example if you search for BBC pagecasts there are 12 results of pages using BBC content, only two of these were set up by the BBC the others are set up by Pageflakes users making their own aggregation of BBC content. And this is very early days.

This curatorial role of audiences will begin to challenge more established media in presenting and aggregating content. There is a star rating which gives the BBC establishd page 5 stars. There doesn't seem to be a way to rate pagecasts so perhaps this star rating is some way of establishing 'authorship' if such a thing still exists.

The other interesting thing is that a couple of the pagecasts with BBC content also contain advertising widgets. See this page set up by 8x6 of BBC Sports with ads for skiing holidays. What does this mean in terms of the owners right to content and the revenue created by that content.

The brave new world of aggretation and curating by individuals is here. Publishers and broadcasters beware - if you don't pick up on these new media spaces quickly someone else will do it for you and reap the benefit.