Forbes.com: Microsoft goes after Google

Lost in this article (and most covering the MSN Newsbot launch) is the long term impact that aggregation and intermediation has on original content publishers, especially the biggies in the newspaper business.

Sure, from one perspective, additional distribution is a wonderful thing, and in fact it allows companies like Knight Ridder to attract national visitors to its local outlets.

However, Knight Ridder now gets the majority of its visitors from search (organic, SEM and news aggregation), with exceptionally low month-over-month repeat rates (<20% in most makets). National visitors don't come because they recognize and respect the brand; they come because Google's news algo happened to throw a KR article to the top of the heap. Can you say commoditization?

RSS seems like the obvious answer, but with online news site visits as poor as they are already, allowing users to skim all of your headlines w/o actually recording a page view or ad impression might well lead to further deterioration of core metrics.