While destination “social news” sites like Digg are still popular, “content tracking” is proving to be the current rage. What I mean by that is applications such as the TweetMeme “retweet” and Facebook “share” buttons that are popping up on many blogs, which allow people to easily post web pages and stories that they like on their social media profiles.

There’s benefit to the user in being able to express themselves through their content browsing habits and the ability to share content with friends and colleagues, and there’s benefit to publishers who help to push content “virally.”

What particularly interests me today is how content aggregation, social media, and content tracking applications are all intermingling around specific topics and content experiences. In my view this is the future of online content and social media because, when done right, it provides specific audiences with high value and relevant content and tools.

Browsing the webs today I noticed two great examples of this.

The first is StockTwits, which aims to serve “Real Investors. Real Ideas. Real Time.,” received an additional $3 million in funding. I’ve been following StockTwits for a while, mostly through Howard Lindzon’s blog, and think that it’s doing really cool things in bringing real time stock news and chatter to the tuned in financial community. TechCrunch notes: “Traders are clearly enamored with the product and love the constant stream of company/sector specific data.” My belief is that in the future this kind of product will expand beyond Twitter (which is of course a massive ecosystem in of itself these days) to include a spectrum of mainstream media news, blog posts, and “user generated” chatter from across the social web.

Social news company Mixx is also producing social media and content aggregation integrations worth watching. Today they announced the launch of NHL TweetMixx, that includes:

* A “Chatter” tab that keeps track of what NHL fans are
talking about

* A “Links” tab with the most up-to-date links that match your list of
search terms

* Unwrapped, abbreviated links with text, video and photos, so you
don’t have to navigate away from the NHL Tweetmixx channel

* A widget that makes it easy to share the NHL TweetMixx Channel with
other websites, your Facebook page (coming soon), MySpace page, blogs
and more! You can pick up the widget right off the NHL TweetMixx
channel. Its a must-have for any hockey blog.

While the initial implementation is a little bit clunky looking, this is a perfect example of how a specific community (rabid hockey fans) can obtain topic-specific news, links, rich media, and chatter related to their favorite sport.

While there are many other examples of cool content aggregation/social media that are pointing the way forward, I really believe that this is just the beginning of the beginning. I for one will be staying tuned!

Exhibit A: Steve Rubel is talking about digital curation and the role that brands can help play to find “good stuff.” In AdAge, Rubel notes that while Facebook and Google are dominating our attention online today, there’s an enormous need for a mix of automated and human tools to help us make sense of and synthesize the chaos of information overload. Rubel goes on to point out that smart companies like Microsoft and UPS are laying claim to “categories” in which they can help to provide the role of digital curator about topics that are important to them (Windows 7 in the case of Microsoft, general business news in the case of UPS).

I then recalled that Rubel echoed these thoughts when I interviewed him recently for Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere:

There's a huge role for professional digital curators – people who can separate art from junk in high-value niches. Blogs do so. But so do automated sites like the ones Sawhorse is building. There will also always be a market for content creators who know how to stand out from the din.

Exhibit B: Also involves an interview, in this case one that I just completed with Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis last week. In response to my question about Netscape’s influential role in creating a hybrid approach to user generated and human curated news, Calacanis talked about how products like Digg Dialoggs are “laying produced content on top of community content” and ended by stating flat out that, “Curation is the future of the Internet.”

I’ve long felt that this “post-web 2.0” period that we’re in has a great need for platforms that allow for the curation and aggregation of specific topics and themes to meet specific needs, which might range from online communities to product launches to subject specific websites or blogs. And it’s exciting to see leading voices talking up this trend and products launching from a bevy of sources to satisfy this need.

(this post first appeared on Technorati)

Fachak is trying to differentiate itself by being a place where you can aggregate and share your content from places like YouTube, but is also a UGC platform where you can upload and share your media with a particular emphasis on PowerPoint and other “documents.” So I’m not sure if Fachak is trying to be a consumer-facing entertainment and social media platform, a B2B collaboration suite of sorts, or something in between. Also it must be noted that much of what Fachak is working toward has already been perfected (or very nearly so) by FriendFeed, in my opinion.

Fachak, at present, is really rough, and really early. There’s simply a lot of little things that need to be tweaked, improved, or revised. For example, three little stars appear underneath videos, giving the indication that you can vote for the content. The expectation is that if you click a star as a logged in user, you should be able to submit your own vote. Instead, you’re brought to the content drilldown page. When you relocate the stars on the drilldown page, the voting mechanism is again a little bit clunky. No matter which of the stars you hover over, the text “Rate 3 to Fachak It” appears. And when you final select one of the three, your vote is collected, but you’re not informed of how your input affected the overall ranking of the content.

Streamy’s new mantra: cutting through the online noise with personalized recommendations, groups and custom filters. It’s a single view for all your blog subscriptions, Twitter feed, FriendFeed and other inputs, with the ability to post updates back to services like Twitter, Digg, Delicious and Facebook without leaving the site.

Streamy Demo from Streamy on Vimeo.

Just said to a colleague: “This is where social media is going.”

The answer of course is everything… or thereabouts.

One of things that excites me the most about the interwebs, that gets me up in the morning racing for the laptop (and let’s not forget the coffee) is the prospect of finding out about services, platforms, and activities that meet human needs in some kind of new and interesting way.

And something I get particularly geeked out about is innovation within the area of content aggregation – how websites are collecting information and allowing people to share, communicate, and create relationships around that aggregation of information.

Here’s the beauty thing: the amount of content being generated online will vastly increase and accelerate for generations to come, and not only that, but the amount and variety of content being generated will vastly increase and accelerate for generations to come. And keep in mind that it’s pretty increased and accelerated already!

In other words, there’s endless piles of stuff to collect and do something interesting with. And those websites that do the most interesting things will tend to draw audiences and be successful. Which will encourage the next round of innovation, and on and on.

Over only the last two or three years, we’ve seen a massive spike in the number and type of services looking to harness information while providing a community platform and features. Some, like Digg, are already web institutions. Others, like FriendFeed, are leading the charge on a new wave of innovation.

But it’s still just the very beginning.

A Mashable story about a new gaming community called Vigster brought these thoughts to mind:

For each game on the site, users can also give reviews and ratings, begin discussions and layer in as much additional information as possible. That includes screen shots, videos, and other data that could be deemed useful. In this sense, Vigster is much like a wiki for video games . In Vigster’s own words, the community-driven content enables the site to become an “IMDB for video games.”

So you can look at Vigster in one of two ways. You can say: so what, big deal, it’s a little Wikipedia, a little IMDB, a little Shelfari/Amazon, a little Facebook/MySpace and it’s about video games.

Or you can say the above but cut the “so what” and emphasize the big deal. That’s not to say that Vigster is going to set the world on fire – I have no idea if it will or won’t. But what’s important to me is that innovation is based upon iterating on what has already been done while finding a market need.

And then comes both the most fun and hardest part: executing on the idea and producing the best possible expression of the vision.