And shortly after that it appears on a dozen other sites, repurposed, with different ads and different links, but otherwise the story is exactly the same. Now focus on the cash flow. The portal puts an ad on the page. They collect revenue for the ad. A percentage of the revenue flows back to the company that the editor works for.
Money flows from the source of the hit to the source of the story.
My company, UserLand, has been working with Netscape and others on a reversal of the Vignette philosophy. Instead of being a flow concentrator, we propose to be flow distributors, with value flowing in the opposite direction, from the source of the content to the source of the click. Our aggregation engine, My.UserLand. Com, gathers new links from the web and flows them for free to anyone who wants to pick them up. Everything you need to participate in the syndication flow will be free and open source.