Bell Canada plans to enter the comparison-shopping engine business next year with a service called Bell Agora. Bell has been looking at different technolgy platforms and talking with local online retailers (an easy assignment given there aren't that many of them, to be honest). Maybe Bell has come up with a way to make a shopping engine work that Google/Froogle has failed to figure out. One of Canada's only shopping engines is Calgary-based Shoptoit.com, which recently celebrated its first anniversary.

I heard an interesting discussion yesterday on the radio as two newspaper sports reporters talked about how the Web how will impact what newspapers will cover as more advertising moves online. One thing that seems like a no-brainer is a lot of agate (horse racing results, scores, etc.) could be eliminated as sports section use their editorial space for news and features. This is already happening within many business sections as stock charts are moved to the Web. Another interesting scenario raised by the two reporters is newspapers may back away from covering the news and, instead, focus on doing more features and analysis stories. They figure a lot of the news such as game reports will already be available online well before their newspaper stories come out the next morning. Does this mean newspaper won't provide game coverage or even send reporters to out of town games? Not likely, but you could see shorter game stories complemented by longer features/analysis pieces.
Update: The New York Times has a story about how the news online has a shelf life of 36 hours, which suggests people want more than the hot news. It's also interesting the NYT is reducing the size of its newspaper by 1.5" and close its printing operations in Edison, N.J. to save $42-million a year.