There’s so much business news to share yet I keep finding myself tweaking World Cypher’s Hip Hop River of News as mad fantasies of a Hip Hop Series of Tubes float through my fevered skull.

In fact, I’ve even started playing around with some other feed mixes around themes that interest me over at Flux Research, yet another little side project from which to learn that will fittingly remain in flux.

One of the things I’m discovering is that XML newsfeeds have a long ways to go before they’ll ever all be able to play together nicely and that most big search engines have serious trouble getting rid of duplicate news stories.  However, I did find that IceRocket does an excellent job of removing duplicates.

I’m also finding the Flickr box provided by Pageflakes a real pain.  It’s not keeping up with the Flickr stream effectively and it adds a stupid code to my domain.  Unfortunately, the Flickr badge doesn’t give me the right size for my current site though I’ll probably shift over to that option.

A cool thing about the present situation with Web 2.0 and related phenomenon is that all sorts of people are playing around with the possibilities.  This also means that the obvious ideas that can be implemented with relatively simple web services are quickly glutted with activity.  So I’m not expecting the River of News to lead to a flow of cash.

But I am interested in experiments and what folks are up to so here are a few focused on hip hop:

I recently heard from Bronx River Parkway which is an experiment similar to World Cypher in some regards but with larger ambitions and a wider range of themes.  I like the design quite a bit.  It’s very simple, straightforward and usable yet still quite attractive.

Since part of what I’m doing is playing with the Hip Hop 2.0 theme, I should point to RapSpace.tv, a social networking site that positioned itself early with the Hip Hop 2.0 tag, the kind of thing to which journalists respond.

State of Minds is in transformation mode after an initial incarnation as a sort of hip hop arts exchange/network.  Though you might not consider the new version a Web 2.0 site, per se, the fact that there are numberous ways to use RSS feeds, widgets and so forth to create portals of streaming material means that entering this space requires a really strong point of differentiation.

For content creators curious about the business implications of Web 2.0, whether in relationship to hip hop or not, it’s obvious that what you choose and how you choose it becomes an important function.  However, if that choice making, no matter how inspired, comes in a package or context that one sees regularly duplicated across the web, folks may never get to find out what a great 2.0 editor you turned out to be.

That also goes for new hip hop bloggers cranking out news summary blogs.  There’s just a real limit to how far you can go with replicating what’s already been done.  It’s much more important that you develop your own voice and perspective.  Once you have that, you’ll have a better chance of breaking through the increasing levels of noise that will be keeping your voice from being heard.

Update:
I knew there was a project of Hashim’s I meant to mention but it slipped my mind.  Maybe I shouldn’t call his Google Reader hip hop news stream a project but, in a way, using such a service and making it public turns one into a content creator in the editorial sense.  So it’s a project even if it’s not!