Mark Hall, a former executive with RealNetworks, fell in love with online video two years ago, thanks to an ultrafast broadband connection in his London home. When he returned to San Francisco last year, he decided to address the growing need in online video, VodPod: a way to find just the good stuff and skip the junk.

This is one of the hot opportunities in new new media: hyperaggregation. If aggregation is what we’ve seen so far on YouTube and Flickr, hyperaggregation is aggregating the aggregators. The way of the Web is to go meta - a website is born and covers politics, then another, and another, and that leads inexorably to … a blog that covers all the websites that tackle politics.

Growing in Google’s shadow — Smart sites evolve, that is, from aggregators to hyperaggregators. To see what I’m talking about, take a look at another hyperaggregator, ViralVideos.com, which simply lists the most watched videos from the most popular sites, such as YouTube and Metacafe.

A more sophisticated example is Original Signal, which takes a dozen of the biggest Web 2.0 tech blogs and puts their headlines on one customizable page. On the site each blog is known as a “signal.” You can change the order of the signals displayed, have any signal delivered to your cell phone or RSS reader, or even hyperaggregate the signals on an Original Signal widget that you can add to your own blog.

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