The new aggregators

A look at the new class of “Sin­gle Page Aggregators.”

Way back in 1997 I was one of dozens of lots of web design­ers trying
to fig­ure out how to bring an edi­to­r­i­al voice to the inter­net. The web
had tak­en off and there pages and links every­where but few places where
they were actu­al­ly orga­nized in a use­ful man­ner. As I’ve writ­ten before,
in Decem­ber of that year I start­ed a week­ly updat­ed list of annotated
links to arti­cles on non­vi­o­lence, a form we’d now would rec­og­nize as a
blog.

About
eigh­teen months ago I start­ed a “links blog” of inter­est­ing Quaker
links, incor­po­rat­ed as a side­bar on my pop­u­lar “Quak­er­Ran­ter” personal
blog. I even­tu­al­ly gave the links their own URL (Quak​erQuak​er​.org)
and invit­ed oth­ers to join the link­ing. I always stum­ble when try­ing to
tell peo­ple what Quak­erQuak­er is all about. The best def­i­n­i­tion is that
its a “col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly edit­ed blog aggre­ga­tor” but that’s a horribly
tech description.

The rise of blogs is cre­at­ing the neces­si­ty for these sort of theme-based aggre­ga­tors. This morn­ing I stum­bled on Orig­i­nal Sig­nal, a new site that organzes the best Web 2.0 blogs. A site called Pop­URLs does the same for “the lat­est web buzz.” A site called Solu­tion­Watch has writ­ten about these in Track­ing the web with Sin­gle Page Aggre­ga­tors. We’re all on to some­thing here. I sus­pect that some­time this fall some clever per­son will coin a new term for these sites.

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