Web 2.0 Mash-ups and the New Aggregators

The New Aggregators

Blogs are rapidly proliferating and we are once again in a state of information overload. It is easy for avid readers to build up a daily reading list of over a hundred blogs. Feed readers such as Bloglines and Google Reader allow users to organize their list and to get an overview of all of the new posts in one place. But many users don’t want to be burdened by pulling together their own list of blogs and turn instead to aggregators.

For my purposes here, an aggregator is a web site or feed that pulls together topically related posts from a number of individual blogs.

Dumb aggregators

The simplest aggregators follow the model of Planet, a Python-based program that combines feeds from an approved set of blogs and republishes them as-is. This method works for professional blogs that keep a tight focus on well defined topics; the best Planet-type aggregators I know focus on technology issues.

The editorial voice in these set-source aggregators comes from the person who compiles the list of source feeds. The list represents a fixed-set of authoritative voices, an “A List” set of bloggers on the topic; in practice it usually reflects a pre-existing community.

These aggregators do not work particularly well with non-professional blogs, as few independent bloggers keep exclusively to one topic (my personal blog is included in a few Planet-like aggregators and I’m always a little embarrassed and amused when my personal posts show up there).

Set-source aggregators are not ...