Ah, a diatribe. That wonderful time when one gets to take the reporter hat off and just, well, go off. On the subject of aggregators I’m not actually that violently opposed to them, it just occurred to me how relatively worthless things like news.google.com or the amazing looking news visualizer are.
You see, there was a time when Google News was one of the first sites I visited. Then I started waking up to NPR. It turns out that when you aggregate all the “top” stories, you actually get a bunch of really lame, really similar stories about something that may have little to nothing to do with your life. And while that’s all well and good, I’m not going to actively click on that link about an indicted senator. They’re always getting indicted. But when NPR has the story they run the news and offer some form of simple analysis. So without lifting a finger I have stories passively presented to me. I either tune in, or I don’t.
It’s almost like the Internet doesn’t know what makes it special. Its in it’s awkward teenage years and doesn’t realize that acting like your 22 year-old brother is going to make you cool. You have to discover your own talents.
Social networking, as overused as the term is, represents a future of the Internet, but I’m not even convinced that’s worth getting to worked up about. While it can put things in context, it can also get full of shit very quickly. More and more I’m convinced that the semantic web, or some similar solution is the future. If the Internet knows what stories or data visualizations are related, it can offer them up without just pushing the “top” stories. Aggregation only takes you so far. At some point you have to start deaggregating the content you actually want.
