‘Tech tapeworms in the intestines of the internet’
IDEA No 88
AGGREGATION
It is not news that we no longer get our news from newspapers. From news and reviews to classified information, aggregation sites now provide us with the stories that are most interesting to us.
Flipboard presents socially aggregated content in a magazine format.
Content aggregators gather stories from across the Web to share in a single, convenient place. With billions of webpages competing for our attention, aggregation has become an essential way of filtering out the noise. Rather than having to wade through pages of irrelevant content, you can choose a voice you trust and have content curated for you.
Sites like the Drudge Report, Fark, the Huffington Post, Reddit and Google News are all examples of news aggregation sites. Launched in 1997, the Drudge Report consists mainly of links to stories sourced from mainstream media in the US. Each link carries a headline written by Matt Drudge or his editors. (The Drudge Report rose to fame in 1998 when it broke the Monica Lewinsky story before other traditional media outlets; see The Drudge Report.) Fark is more irreverent. Drew Curtis launched the site in 1999 as a way to share news stories with his friends. The first article he posted was about a fighter pilot who had crashed while attempting to moon another pilot. In 2005 the Pulitzer Prize-winning Huffington Post launched as a liberal alternative to the Drudge Report. As well as aggregated content, the Post features original stories from journalists and celebrities.
While the Drudge, Fark and the HuffPo all have editors sifting through content to choose the stories their readers are most likely to enjoy, an editor is not always essential. Social news site Reddit is entirely crowdsourced. Users submit links and other users vote the story up or down. Google News disposes with the human touch altogether, using an algorithm to select the most relevant stories.
Aggregation sites do not just have to be used for news. Rotten Tomatoes gathers all film reviews into a single place. WikiLeaks infamously does the same for classified information. Similar sites exist for music, financial services, cars, cameras … the list goes on. More recent aggregation services collate news from the social web. Flipboard collects content from social networks and other feeds, presenting it in magazine format that users can ‘flip’ through.
This is not without controversy. Newspapers constantly complain about aggregators stealing their content. Robert Thompson, editor of the Wall Street Journal, does not mince his words, calling them ‘tech tapeworms in the intestines of the Internet’. This may be true, but it is not going to change. Like all mass-media companies, the WSJ is no longer a distributor of news. It is a content creator and it needs to shape its business model accordingly.■
‘Aggregation has become an essential way of filtering out the noise.’
Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar’s We Feel Fine searches the Web for occurrences of the phrase ‘I feel’ and then categorizes these feelings by age, gender and location. Through millions of individual stories, the site becomes ‘a barometer for the world’s emotions’.