There's huge value in aggregation. Most of what Google does is aggregation. And now, with the coming of ads in RSS feeds, there is some pushback from the publishers which tend to create content more than aggregate it. Tom Foremski has some quotes and insight on what the publishers are thinking:

Millstein went further, saying that Hearst has become marginalized by the aggregators and wouldn't let it happen again. "The big money is being made by the aggregators, but who wants to be one of 1,000 publishers? That's just nickels and cents. We want to play the role of the aggregator."

Ah yes, aggregation is the easy money route, but it's starting to look pretty crowded. But Foremski's wrap-up also sounds right:

My take is that content will be king, this time around. And being a content producer/publisher (with an online cost base) is a very good place to be, because the headline links in Google, or in a news aggregator such as Yahoo Finance, have to lead to original content. And original content is hard to produce and cannot be done by machines.

True, but it's amazing how a relatively simple aggregation trick can out-leverage any single publisher's potential gains.

¶ 5/19/2005