It's been a very interesting few days at the Buying and Selling eContent Conference at Camelback in Scottsdale, AZ. This morning we participated in a series of roundtable discussions, including interesting discussions on mobile content, content repurposing, dealing with Google, and so on. In the mobile discussion a traditional news distributor was wrestling with the ins and outs of how to deal with the mulitplicity of channels to be managed for mobile content, wondering how to come up with a strategy that was cost-effective from a licensing and implementation perspective. Enter Newstex, a new company established by ex-Comtex executives Steve Ellis and Larry Schwartz. Newstex has announced its Content on Demand service, a new content feed capability that combines news from traditional sources and from weblogs selected by Newstex for their topic coverage and editorial quality. All of this gets indexed with categorization metadata, stock ticker symbols and can be packaged into tailored feeds suitable for many different distribution environments, including RSS feeds compatible with weblog news readers and SMS feeds for mobile platforms.

Newstex a very interesting combination of old and new business models, accepting the widening definition of what creates value in news content in an agnostic but quality-minded fashion and adding effective metadata that makes it as useful as any news product from traditional sources. The Newstex platform's tailoring capabilities allows highly specific content sets to be fed to destination sites, allowing highly efficient near-realtime delivery of targeted content sets in standard or custom formats, thus eliminating the need for local processing platforms. Being able to think broadly about content sources and to tailor solutions to highly specific needs very cost-effectively is one key aspect of success in The New Aggregation, focusing on specific attributes of content aggregation that aren't tied to narrow assumptions about what constitutes quality content as sources of success and focusing on highly specific client content needs for those sources. Feeds are an old game, but there's new life in them when new thinking is applied.