Last week I talked about web discovery engines and the like. That’s one way of finding what you want on the internet. There’s also another way that I think is more efficient. Sites that put together content for you/by you are becoming more and more popular. The websites that do this are called content aggregators.
There are two types of aggregators that I am going to talk about. First, news aggregators are sites that take news stories and put them all together on one website. They can differ in style as Google News uses an algorithm to automatically place stories from different sources on their site. On the other hand they can be chosen by an editor and given an sometimes opinionated side of the story, something like The Huffington Post does when they aggregate stories from news organizations.
The other type of aggregator I will call a social content aggregator. These are sites like Reddit, The Chive, and The Daily What. They all take content such as links to other websites, images, videos, and pretty much anything else you could ever think of and combine them onto their site. The Chive is an aggregator website that has gone viral. Users submit photos and videos to the site and a team of roughly ten workers at The Chive choose which submissions to post on their site.
Reddit meanwhile is completely run by user submissions and voting on which submissions are the best. It’s a good place to learn something new, hear some interesting news and other people’s opinions on issues. It also is just a good place to waste time and read funny memes, or look at images and videos. There are thousands of “subreddits” that pertain to certain subjects. Users can ‘upvote’ submissions that they believe everyone should see, the same goes for the comments.
Hottest submission on Reddit RIGHT NOW is a video of some genius logic:
I think sites like Reddit are good for the internet/society because they help show transparency in the news media – even the world. One of their mottoes was to ‘Restore Truthiness’. Users own the news and can comment on something if they disagree or have any sort of educated opinion.
So whether you like discovering things on StumbleUpon or finding the most ‘upvoted’ link on Reddit, there are many ways to use the internet. With any technology, it’s finding the best way to use it that takes time.
Tweet of the day:
Comedy Tweets
@TheComedyJokesSWAG = (S)omething (W)e (A)ll (G)et tired of hearing
