Throwing everything against the wall  

Two interesting bits of news about online media today: first is the announcement that the Washington Post and a couple other papers will be providing links to competitors' stories. This step fits right in with the Post's open, free-content approach; in some ways it's an extension of the trackbacks they already have linking to relevant (usually) blog posts. It'll be interesting to see how it affects their bottom line.

Then there's this story about Yahoo and Google paying the AP and other big news services for syndicating their content. This is great news if you're concerned about the viability of the news business, but I'm a little confused about what it is they're paying for. Obviously Yahoo rebrands a lot of content, reproducing it in its entirety under the Yahoo News banner. But as far as I know Google simply aggregates links, which is a different kind of use altogether. If simply being allowed to aggregate or link to content is of value to Google, maybe they should be paying me too...