What is a News Aggregator?

Submitted by Morbus Iff on Thu, 2002-06-27 15:35

I simply must take odds with Dave Winer's WHAT IS A NEWS AGGREGATOR? - not just because I code an aggregator myself (like Winer produces RADIO USERLAND), but because there's a number of idiocies that are typical Winerisms. Yeah, I'm insanely late reporting my thoughts on this, but hell, I've been busy.

For one, his opening salvo of what a news aggregator entails ("reads a set of news sources, finds the new bits, and displays them in reverse chronological order on a single page") is pretty damned limiting. If aggregators never evolved from this point, they're not much useful past 50 points of aggregation. Not allowing the aggregation to be sorted by user desire (as opposed to "reverse chronological order") is a pretty egregious sin (one that will be fixed in the next version of AMPHETADESK).

Winer continues: "early in 2001 we released Radio UserLand 7.0 which was the first software to bring XML-based aggregation to the desktop." This is plainly incorrect. Carmen's Headline Viewer was available on the desktop since APRIL 25, 1999, and debut'd a few scant months after "UserLand built its first news aggregator, My.UserLand.Com, in 1999". Naysayers complain that CHV wasn't crossplatform, but more than likely, it's "well, hey, CHV didn't sort reverse chronologically", blah blah blah. In a world of semanticism, we're still fighting on the meaning of aggregation (hell, in that case, AMPHETADESK heralded a world of truly crossplatform, open source, aggregation compatible with a well established programming language! Whee, press releases are fun!).

Typical Winer makes the world his oyster with "in January 2002, Radio UserLand 8.0 shipped, and news aggregation became a mainstream application." "Mainstream"? What about portals and push technology, like Pointcast (dead), My Yahoo (useless), or Onepage (dead)? What about NewsIsFree.com? Where has HISTORY gone?

Dave's right, though - it's been very exciting "to watch many of the smart people in weblog-land discover the convenience and power of news aggregators". It's also been very heartening to see people embrace the RSS syndication format with open arms, as well as the community opening up it's time to evangelizing and helping those with questions.

I shouldn't be surprised that the answer to the innocent question of "What Is?" is a giant press release for Radio Userland - it's typical marketing, and typical Winer. Ah well.