I recently made a comment on the libr559m discussion board about how I preferred “human aggregation” over algorithmically generated content that you find on most aggregator websites. I listed Arts & Letters Daily and Longreads.com as two good examples of websites providing content that has been aggregated by a human (or humans) as opposed to just a computer. After reading this article on Zdnet by Tom Foremski I realized that my understanding of aggregation is somewhat off base. Foremski, correctly of course, points out that aggregation is, by definition, “the collection of as many things that can be found related to a topic.” as opposed to curation, which is “a person or persons, engaged in the act of choosing and presenting things related to a specific topic and context.” Which means that when I spoke of “aggregators with a human touch” I was really talking about curation not aggregation.

As a result I’ve now spent some time considering the quest for the curated web and whether anyone is really anywhere close to producing curated content using algorithms in the same way aggregated content is being produced. Foremski mentions blekko, which descibes itself as “slash tag search”. The video below is pretty interesting:

This is all very promising, but the search is limited to the “slash tags” for which people at blekko have already curated content. As I’m a big of a soccer nut, I tried searching for soccer /coaching and was given the following message: “You do not have a slashtag called /coaching. Do you want to try: soccer /soccer”. I did not find that particularly useful. However, if you sign up and become a member you can create your own hashtag searches, which I assume others could search for and use as well. In this way it becomes sort of like a cross between Google and the social bookmarking site delicious. This adds to the human involvement in blekko’s curation of the web.

Another site that claims to “curate” rather than aggregate content online is Thoora. Well actually Thoora actually allows the user to curate their own content and it is a pretty powerful app. This is different because it searches twitter for stories on your chosen topic that have been linked in tweets. I usually use a Boolean search in the Twitter search bar to find comments and opinions on specific topics in the twitterverse, but Thoora actually culls out all the chatter and presents articles that have been shared by other Twitter users.

So as the video points out Thoora depends on their users to create the curated content, and the results are pretty good… unless you try searching the keywords “soccer” “coaching”. When I tried this Thoora returned a message saying “Sorry, there was an error with your request. Please try again later.” Now I know that there are plenty of blogs that post on twitter about soccer coaching, since I use it all the time just for that purpose, so that result seemed a bit strange. But stranger yet were the list of suggested keywords that Thoora thought would aid my search about ‘soccer’ and ‘coaching’ – michael lahoud lahoud, equality night, noh8, los angeles gay, michael lahoud, straight allies, mike chabala, justin braun. Yes, the names on this list key words are soccer players – not very well known players – but they do have an association with the game of soccer, however nothing on that list of suggested keywords has anything whatsoever to do with coaching. I’ll accept that maybe my choice of keywords is not exactly “mainstream”. For instance, when I searched for “republican” I got a reasonable list of keywords as well as a good mix of articles about right wing U.S. politics. So the service works if you choose the right topic to search for.

I was reasonably intrigued by both blekko and Thoora. Enough to keep them in my arsenal of search engine tools. However, until they achieve a critical mass of subscribers (who are also the curators) there will continue to be frustrating gaps in their content. So both are promising but fall a little short of the mark.

Posted: 08|16|11 at 10:22 pm. Filed under: LIBR559M.
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