A new way to define niche audiences in a time challenged world

Om Malik at Business 2.0 writes about Mark Hall, a former executive with RealNetworks, and his decision "to address the growing need in online video: a way to find just the good stuff and skip the junk. " His self-funded startup, VodPod, allows consumers to build their own "pods," which is Hall's rather fancy term for online video channels.

"The idea is that you grab the videos you like from any of the other 100-odd video-sharing sites already online - say, every bird-watching vid you can get your hands on - and build a channel called the Birding Pod. Anyone can watch it, and anyone can add videos to the channel."

So, as is Om's style, he goes on to fling the buzz word hyperaggregation 9 times to describe what is going on. Regular readers here know how much I love buzz words (NOT!). But he does have an important point to make, so it merits further exploration.

In brief: aggregation is what we've seen so far on YouTube and Flickr. Hyperaggregation is the aggregation of the aggregators. Original Signal is an example, a Web site takes a dozen of the biggest Web 2.0 tech blogs and puts their headlines on one customizable page.

So why is hyperaggregation being yapped about?

Simply, we are plagued by too much information and too little time. It's impossible to keep up with dozens of social networks, millions of videos, and thousands of blogs. Hyperaggregation is a way to do in the new-media world what old media has done for centuries: neatly package information.

At a glance you can see what's important - or in the case of video, what to watch. Smart new companies are finally figuring out how to do this online, where there's too much content and not enough packaging.

I would point out to you that if all this is true, then many venture firms and media companies are wasting their time and resources. Presently, they are trying to build new YouTube clones and not figuring out how to win in hyperaggregation.

So, what will we call it when someone figures out how to aggregate hyperaggregators? I'm open to suggestions.