Virtuous cycle of creativity

The combination of blogs and aggregation is so powerful not just because these are complementary technologies in the obvious sense, but because they promote a 'virtuous cycle' that promotes the creationa and transformation of information.   Of course this cycle is nothing new -- it's been around since forever, through the media of books, libraries, universities, newspapers, et cetera -- but the blog/aggregation combination vastly speeds up the process and reduces the transaction cost to effectively nothing.  Which makes the Long Tail of the information economy accessible.

That's why the announcement of My MSN RSS aggregation with feed search is interesting; a My MSN aggregator, plus MSN Spaces means Microsoft can leverage both sides.  So they could make it very easy, for example, to subscribe to the RSS feeds for Spaces owned by people who comment on your blog.  Or do any number of other things which increase the value of being an MSN member.  And, obviously, these tools still interoperate with the rest of the blogosphere (note that Spaces has had RSS feeds since launch).