Saturday, June 30, 2012

Value-Added Aggregation v. The Human Appendix & Colon


One of the things about Twitter that I value is people who tweet articles that I might otherwise never see. In particular, I appreciate news/information aggregators/curators who post links in tweets that take me to:

  • Their web page, which has the article/blog displayed and preserved for curation;
  • Their web page, which has the article/blog displayed (whether preserved for curation or not);
  • An article/blog web page from a reliable source (Economist, Forbes, etc.);
and so on. This is often enhanced by an observation or commentary to frame the tweeter's perspective or insights, which is value-added aggregation (sometimes with curation).

However, I have encountered something else recently: faux-aggregators. A faux-aggregator offers a link to an article/blog of genuine usefulness. However, when you click the link, it does not send you directly to the article or bring you to their web site hosting of the article, but instead sends you to their site. When you arrive, you find that the article is not displayed. Rather, one or two sentences from the article (usually the lead) are present with another link to the article on its actual host site.

Thus the faux-aggregator drives traffic to his site and gets credit for sending traffic (you) to other sites, but adds nothing of value whatsoever through his intervention. The faux-aggregator merely inserts himself between the reader and the genuine provider of the information. This renders the faux-aggregator as either the human appendix (useless but troublesome) or the colon (a place through which things pass but no nutrition is derived).

Genuine aggregation and/or curation can provide a great boon to people seeking information in a crowded internet. Faux-aggregators add nothing.

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