To All You 'Aggregator Haters' Out There

A bit of misplaced criticism has come to my attention: a statement that this humble weblog "publishes pages and pages of information that may be found elsewhere on the world-wide web but provides no added value to it." Here's another: "You ape what others write and publish through your unstoppable cut and paste routine."

To those above allegations, I answer:

My blogging work includes, but is not limited to, reporting and editing in the traditional way, as well as aggregating information from a variety of sources, sorting and presenting the data to make it understandable.

Those who would criticize me for "cut and paste" would do well to look at their own blogs and tweets to search for occurrences of fleeting instances of originality.

The king of all websites (sometimes mistakenly referred to as a "blog") is THE DRUDGE REPORT. It's 99.999% AGGREGATOR!

NEWSER is an aggregator with 2.5 million unique visitors per month! The Huffington Post became a multi-million dollar website by publishing aggregated content!


Not to mention the amazing Global Voices Online, of which this weblog has been a proud affiliate for years and years!

HuffPo has Stolen scraped cut and pasted taken/lifted content from sources that already have massive amounts of traffic (I saw New York Magazine cited in one article) - basically adding a sentence or two on each end of a "snippet" from the original article, then proceeding to attract DOUBLE or even TRIPLE the number of hits the original source received!

If you are thinking "how can they get away with it?" - they LINK back to the original article - and no one can challenge them!

At least Global Voices adds LOTS of extra content and links. The individuals who contribute to Global Voices (in my opinion) serve journalism and the public in a higher capacity than the crew at HuffPo!

I've also endured criticism over typing errors - sorry, when I turn on Spellcheck it completely shreds my blog*spot posts: corrupting code, adding extra "div" tags where they're not needed, changing style and size of fonts. If typewriters existed in the times of Jesus Christ, these critics would have crucified the Lord long before his time! :)




Tags: aggregator, blog aggregator



Permission to reprint this blog post in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided that the author (or authors) and Dave Lucas are properly cited. Permission to reprint any comments below is granted only for those comments written by Dave Lucas and staff.