News aggregators have been around for a very long time. One of the first successful services was Moreover which during the dot com boom manually ’screen scraped’ the contents of thousands of web news sources, long before RSS was understood and used by content publishers.
What made Moreover unique was its service that allowed website owners to display a consolidated view of the scraped content on their own site using a simple piece of embedded Javascript.
Moreover was an innovator of its time, and although the service still exists in one form or another, it has been superceded by more robust and automated aggregation services such as Google News and Techmeme.
Practically all credible content publishers now allow their content to be accessed through RSS feeds, making news aggregation services a lot simpler, and cheaper, to launch. This has created an over saturated and over crowded marketplace where many aggregation services compete for the limited attention availability of consumers.
Using a free online RSS reader such as Netvibes, every morning I can scan the contents of around 40 of my favourite websites in under two minutes. This makes aggregators, such as Google News, redundant unless I want to read news from outside of my 40 preferred sources.
Although I do still read Techmeme once in a while, I no longer rely on it for my daily reading schedule. If an intresting news item crops up on Techmeme I generally read that story and add the destination sites’ RSS feed to Netvibes if the source is trustworthy enough, bypassing Techmeme altogether.
So whilst automated aggregation services have their uses, they need to evolve if they are to attract the limited attention spans of today’s online information consumers - mine in particular!