Clay Shirky heralds it:
[Nick] Carr ... pointed out that Google news showed 11,264 separate outlets for the Somali pirate story in 2009, almost all of them re-running the same couple of stories. (I was similarly surprised, last year, to discover that syndicated content outweighed locally created content in my old hometown paper by a 2:1 margin.)
The idea that syndication should be different in a digital era has been around for a while now. Jeff Jarvis’s formulation “Do what you do best and link to the rest” dates from 2007, and the AP started talking about about holding back some stories from subscribers in order to drive their PageRank up last year. What could make 2011 the year of general restructuring is Google’s attempt to give credit where credit is due, in the words of their blog post, by offering tags that identify original and preferred sources for syndicated stories.
(Hat tip: Alexis)