Though we're well into the era of content atomization - the inevitable breaking up of content creation, from blogs to traditional publications, into millions of individual components from thousands of sources - we have a long way to go until we have the tools to re-aggregate content in a meaningful way. Simply subscribing to individual blog posts through RSS is like sampling various beverages through hoses; it keeps coming in a stream, and you have no idea what's the good stuff and what's watered down.
You can view sites like Reddit and Digg (Diggit?) as re-aggregators, but only in the context of "top ten" lists: Content components show up as individual items, not well-integrated topic packages, so they suit the one-off or click-around reader more than the immersive reader.
One interesting approach to a more integrated interface is Daylife, a beta site that aggregates news stories, blog posts, images and video into topic packages. One example: this year's World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. A range of components related to the Davos conference, as it's often called, is labelled "Davos Conversation" on Daylife.
It's not clear how much of the article choice and posting process is automated, and how much is done manually. Nor does it necessarily have the "best" posts - there's no way for readers to rate them, nor does there seem to be any rated article source such as Digg et al as a filtering process. Daylife does allow registered users to build their own "my world" space by clicking on gray stars next to content items, and have a news page automatically created for them. (Perhaps Daylife will use this as a de facto rating process in the future.) Even lacking some automated processes, it's an interesting approach, and it's certainly a pointer toward the better-aggregated future.
gB
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