Well, we mentioned the rumblings of Factiva and others joining the Yahoo! subscription Beta earlier today, and now comes an email from Factiva outlining their initial participation. Here's the key paragraph from Factiva:

"Now, Factiva subscribers will be able to retrieve select Factiva articles from their Yahoo! search. Factiva will provide to Yahoo! a daily, "rolling"” selection of content in categories commonly searched on the Web, including sports, entertainment, health and science. By partnering with Factiva, Yahoo! is able to bring a unique value proposition to users the ability to simultaneously search the free web and also access Factiva'’s premium aggregated news and information. Extending Factiva'’s content assets into a mainstream search engine makes Factiva content available to a new and significantly larger audience of business users while providing another access point for existing Factiva subscribers to obtain information."

This sounds like Factiva parked its recently announced RSS feeds on Yahoo!'s doorstep and is using the same validation mechanism used in their NewsGator interface. I have the same thoughts overall on Factiva RSS feeds that I did in a previous posting - pretty limited flexibility and content. But as additional content sources are added Yahoo!'s search will be a much more visible mechanism than NewsGator in which to note news headlines for Factiva users, so as additional content is added from both Factiva and other sources this could be a fairly powerful tool for subscribers. But it's going be interesting to see how newspapers, working hard for online revenues, are going to react to a subscription service honing in on their potential for online ad income from direct searches. Push has really yet to come to shove in this mix, but it's fun to see Factiva and Yahoo! beginning to tip the balance in aggregation that much further from proprietary interfaces to tools that begin to separate subscription management from aggregators' search engines. The New Aggregation is coming on strong...