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 (QuakerQuaker.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.