A few minutes ago the first Corante Hub on Web and Technology has officially opened its doors.

Corante Hubs are nothing else but one of the first incarnations of the newsmastering approach to information filtering and aggregation that I have covered quite a few times on these pages.

What is great about it is that the Corante Hub employs both automated RSS newsmastering aggregation, filtering and republication (using the MySyndicaat newsmastering engine reviewed here) as well as human-edited selection of key posts with additional commentary assigned to a dedicated newsmaster (or Hub editor).

In practical terms, the Corante Hubs (more of them will launch in the coming days) are a one-stop news clearinghouse, or set of newsradars, bringing together for you the key stories and headlines from a highly-qualified group of existing web reporters, writers and bloggers.

Among them (there are already 13 "experts" contributing to the first hub) Danny Ayers, Alex Barnett of Microsoft, Emily Chang, Nancy White, John Tropea, just to name a few of the ones I am already familiar with. Here the whole list of them.

So, if I haven't been clear enough yet, Corante Hubs are nothing less but topic-specific web “destinations” for readers who are
interested in staying on-top of the latest news stories in their specific fields of interest.

As mentioned, new Corante Hubs will be added in the coming days to the Web one, in Corante existing core coverage areas which include marketing, law, science, and media.

Corante Hub sources are generally renowned bloggers in their field of expertise who have agreed to have their original commentary and coverage tracked, editorially cited by the Corante newsmaster (they call it section editor), and then syndicated through that specific hub.

In practical terms you could keep following all of my news (or most of them, as each author keeps a discretionary right to not syndicate over the Corante Hub some of her own posts), by simply subscribing to the Corante Web Hub RSS feed, while getting in one go also the best news from 12 other expert analysts, technologists and web experts. In the near future readers will be allowed to reconfigure and republish the content stream published by any hub as well as being provided with the ability to rate and filter-in only preferred content items.

As of now, the Corante Hub offers you two full RSS feeds:

a) The Editorial Posts feed which includes the newsmaster picks and commentary emerging from them and

b) The Network Posts feed which is nothing else but a supermix of all the thirteen Corante Web Hub sources all aggregated together.

The Corante newsmasters, or Hub Section Editors as they are officially called dedicate their time to digest, contextualize, and select the best and most interesting stories and blog posts coming from the poll of expert sources available.

Corante will also reward financially participating authors by sharing with them revenue that will be generated via advertising and sponsorships on the Corante Hubs, as well as acting as a brokering agency for each individual source blog/site and Corante own advertisers who will be offered to take advantage of direct promotion on Corante and on specific, selected blogs.

Corante plans also to intermediate other marketing opportunities for the individual authors participating in its network, by promoting, organizing and co-marketing training and consulting workshops for individual hub authors.

Overall this is an idea and news delivery format which has been ripening for a while. We'll have to see in the coming days and weeks how effective this format will reveal itself to be, how accessible it will be to the readers and to those wanting to subscribe and search through it (haven't seen nothing on this front yet).

Newsmastering, or the ability to select, filter, aggregate and republish content reflecting a specific topic or theme, is finally finding a stage for it huge potential. The Corante Hubs are a good example on how to make this a sustainable and socially useful content publishing format.