Attention! Seeking!! Aggregate newsfeeds!!

I woke up this morning to find a random tweet by a random tweeter who I don't know tweeting about me.  Adding to the usual Monday confusion (why is it still not Sunday?) said random tweet directed me to a random website - http://paper.li

From what I can tell it's some kind of news aggregate site billed as an online 'newspaper'.  Not in a "The Times Online" way, but in a "look - free info about stuff - all in one place - read it!!" kind of way.  Truth be told I didn't stick around long after the initial read of the plug for my short film The Final Punchline and performed the obligatory self-promotion on social networking sites.

It got me thinking about aggregates, and newsfeeds, and the random bots that just pluck you out of cyberspace and put you down somewhere unexpected.  I have one of those Google-friendly names that means I can find easily find myself in all sorts of nooks and crannies online.  During my days of corporate movie production and social media optimisation I could turn up on anything from obscure tech blogs to Japanese social network postings.

I'm not sure whether this random dispersal of information has any useful effect for any kind of promotion.  Aggregate sites and newsfeeds literally trawl the internet, fish out bits of info and often dump it somewhere completely irrelevant.  I've seen plenty of sites listing my birthday and age but do I get any extra cards? No. It just makes me wonder whether there's any use in aggregated dispersal of information outside of mainstream PR sites.

Incidentally I did the same search for "The Final Punchline" and I had to go as far as page 9 for a random aggregate site listing.  One of our Facebook posts turned up on page 13...and in point of fact the 1st listing at the top of Google is my posting on the National Theatre Wales community!  Social networking 1, news aggregates 0.