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!

As someone who lives on the webby side of the divide, I found the end of the piece to be most compelling:

Somewhere down in the Flatiron, out in Brooklyn, over in Queens or up in Harlem, cabals of bright young things are watching all the disruption with more than an academic interest. Their tiny netbooks and iPhones, which serve as portals to the cloud, contain more informational firepower than entire newsrooms possessed just two decades ago. And they are ginning content from their audiences in the form of social media or finding ways of making ambient information more useful. They are jaded in the way youth requires, but have the confidence that is a gift of their age as well.

I was particularly taken with the phrase “finding ways of making ambient information more useful.” That to me really speaks to what is going on today with social media, making massive communications platforms like Twitter more useful, content aggregation, digital curation, real time news and conversations, and other hot topics going on today.

And now for the bloggy reaction:

* Gawker: Media columnist David Carr just Twittered a caption for his latest filing, a media death knell with a bright-eyed ending, summoning the title of Joan Didion's famous essay about leaving her New York experience behind. Is the comparison merited?

* A VC: David has it about right. I've watched this transformation and helped to finance it (and his first job in NYC too at Inside.com but that's a different story). I believe the move from a velvet rope model to a meritocracy is a good thing and that the new media business we are building in the wake of the old one will be a better media business; leaner, faster, and controlled more by users than media moguls.

* Daily Patricia: Print and media are two different things. Print is an information distribution platform. Media is an industry that creates and delivers information over platforms. This could be any platform as long as the media industry can adapt to it.

* HighTouch: I suspect that this is a story fixed to play itself out over and over again. Media just happened to be one of the early casualties. There is zero reason to believe that this same scenario isn't unfolding for all formerly closed enterprises, and if you think your enterprise is still closed you're just hiding your head in the sand.

* Screenwerk: Trust and quality, two values that content brands should stand for, will continue to gain in importance in this new world of digital serfs and sloppy UGC.

(this post originally appeared on Technorati)

The result, on the webby side at the least, is awfully intriguing.

The Official Avatar Interactive Trailer is an Adobe AIR app that brings the trailer for the lavishly expensive and highly anticipated new film to your desktop, and offers a bunch of interactive and social media features along with it. As Mashable notes, “whenever you watch a trailer, special “hotspots” will come up where you can learn more about the characters. Even cooler though is the integration of Avatar’s Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube feeds. You can get all of the latest news right from the interactive trailer.”

I’m particularly intrigued by the integration of real time subject-specific content feeds that help to enhance the interactive experience, as it relates to my recent piece on digital curation and the future of the Internet. It’s cool to see this kind of content delivery – offering the right content to the right place (people who are excited enough about Avatar to install an AIR app that relates to it) at the right (real) time.

Here’s the Avatar trailer:

(this post originally appeared on Technorati)

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)