Home Alone? How Content Aggregators Change Navigation and Control of Content

Digital Web Magazine - Home Alone? How Content Aggregators Change Navigation and Control of Content

Jason Kottke is fantastic at aggregating content. Every time I read his latest list of links on Kottke.org, I find some tidbit of information that interests me, one I probably wouldn’t have read otherwise. How does he choose content, I wonder? (Recently, his ideas and links about what Google is doing have been particularly interesting.) Some of Kottke’s links don’t interest me at all. But it’s not hard to weed those out. I scan over them quickly, and forget I ever saw them.

Every time someone makes a list, be it on a blog like Kottke’s or a list of groceries, content is aggregated. The act of aggregating content (usually content that is alike in some way) makes it more understandable. Instead of looking at a whole field of information, you choose smaller, more logical subsets of it in the hopes of understanding those. After you’ve done that, you can apply what you’ve learned to the whole, or even just a larger subset.

Should we be concerned that aggregators are increasingly allowing users to find their own ways to use our content how they see fit?

Aggregation lies at the heart of the Web. It has to, given the amount of information that the Web contains. Were it not for aggregation, all the world’s information would be on a single Web page in a single domain. Wouldn’t that be exciting? (And painful!)

Aggregated content can be viewed on a spectrum, with human-aggregated content on one end and machine-aggregated content on the other end. The difference is in the way the content is chosen, and can range from a very strict machine algorithm to the whim of a human who simply “felt like it.”

This is why I don't mind "link and dump" blogging. Sometimes I just think it's interesting to see what someone else thinks is interesting.