(Purcell 2010). The most basic explanation of a news aggregator is a site that gathers stories from other sites and lists them in one place. However, it obviously cannot be this simple. There are different kinds of aggregators further confusing the debate. For the purposes of this analysis, I will discuss four types of aggregators: feed aggregators, specialty aggregators, user-curated aggregators, and blog aggregators.
Feed aggregators typically draw from one type of source but a number of sources and then organize the information into feeds. These feeds can be arranged by source, topic, or story (Isbell 2010). Some common examples of feed aggregators include GoogleNews and YahooNews. Feed aggregators usually list the headline, lead, name of the originating website, and a link to the full story. In this sense, CNN’s News Pulse (beta) is another example of a feed aggregator, but one that only gets information from one source (CNN).
Specialty aggregators gather information about a specific topic or location. This could be a feed like Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire, which only gathers political information, or Outside.in, which gathers information about your specific neighborhood (if it is one of the 57,830 they cover). They include much of the same information that feeds do but are more limited in topic and scope.
A “User‐Curated Aggregator” is a website that features user‐submitted links and portions of text taken from a variety of websites (Isbell 2010). They come from a wide variety of sources and use a variety of media. An example would be Digg, where users post stories and
can then “digg” it, and the more “diggs” the page gets, the higher it moves in the feed.
Blog Aggregators are websites that use third‐party content to create a blog about a given topic (Isbell 2010). The Huffington Post is the most popular blog aggregator when it comes to news. HuffPost, as it is commonly called, it organized into topics. There are many different types of content, including HuffPost originals, AP stories and stories and blogs from outside sources.
Blog aggregators sometimes take excerpts from different stories and blogs and combine them together into one story, linking to the original posts. Sometimes they repost the original story with a new headline, and sometimes with the original headline. According to Ariana Huffington of the Huffington Post, their goal is to “guide our readers to the most interesting and timely news and opinion from places they know and from places that we introduce them to, as well as offering them original reporting, 200 original blog posts a day, citizen journalism, and our new investigative fund,” (Huffington 2009).
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