For me, these two deals between RealClearPolitics and Time and Fox (featured on PaidContent.org today) are part of a much larger story that I think has been overlooked for the most part: the mainstream media recognition and acceptance that in order to succeed in Web 2.0, you need to provide your readers with value-add to what surely will be further surfing on the internet.

This is a big deal — web 1.0 was about taking existing media business models and just making them electronic — as recently as a year ago I had a conversation with a top 10 newspaper GM who asked me, “why would I want to to link to anyone else’s site? I want people to stay on my site!” And the old way of doing business was I own my editors, I own my writers, and I want you to stay here!

I think what we’re seeing now is a slew of mainstream media organizations recognizing that a) people will surf to other sites whether you like it or not b) you have an opportunity as a brand to add more value to the experience if you can provide further filtering and help to these readers and c) if you don’t do it, your competitors will.
What’s cool about these two deals is how the mainstream media companies are actually using RealClearPolitics as an intelligent filter. In Time.com’s instance, Time is pursuing a very smart strategy of shining light on a collection of other blogs that augment their existing content, in addition to having some of their existing writers write blogs. In addition to RealClearPolitics, there is www.andrewsullivan.com, Mike Allen has a blog, etc.

In FoxNews.com’s instance, the FoxNews and RealClearPolitics (and ParticipateMedia) have worked together to create Opinion BuzzTracker that leverages the wisdom of the crowds of the top (think head of the tail) political blogs to determine the “most” important story of the day in politics.

In both cases, this is much more than a simple “click here to see related stories” feature — but rather these organizations putting their editorial footprint on a larger browsing experience.

And one of the points of BuzzTracker is that it is more than a completely automated service — there is editorial control on blog sources, search parameters, etc. that allows us to provide what we consider to be an intelligent filter for the blogososphere on those topics.

What do you think?