“Is it any surprise, then, that search engines are no longer the most popular sites in the U.S.? Those bragging rights now belong to social-networking sites like Facebook…”

“But, now, when we have idle time, we don’t go to Google anymore; we go to Facebook. And on Facebook, we don’t have to seek information. Instead, information just comes to us.”

“Perhaps Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, is onto something with the alpha release of his new Wikia search engine (currently the 400th most visited engine in the Hitwise directory of search engines in the U.S.), which combines the push of social networks with the pull of information search by allowing users to edit and monitor search results Wikipedia-style.”
Read the Full Time Magazine Article Here

I have been starting to use more aggregation tools recently instead of the original search and surf approach and am finding I am much more informed, up to date and becoming exposed to a much greater depth and breadth of content. This is very time efficient, in essence letting all other users do the work and bring the great content to the top.

At the same time I can’t help but wonder what else is hidden down there in the depths and when I have more free time on my hands I like to dig a little deeper and “Stumble upon” things, while not actually using stumbleupon.

(Note: I find logic through looking at things in categories or levels. So here is my first take on a view of the spectrum of pop content reading to fresh content creation.)

This way instead of being the consumer of others highly rated/ viewed content through stumbleupon, aggregation type sites (lets call this Popsurfing - L1 Disclaimer: this term has probably already been coined somewhere else…) , there is a role of bringing some of the hidden gems to the surface and potentially into the realm of aggregation site coverage (lets call this Dropsurfing (deeper that pop sites) - L2)

In my mind the next step is blogging/commentating on this content so others are exposed to it also and can access it through other channels (RSS, Blogs Social networking sites), this is Spinoff- L3, creating new content about other peoples content, kinda what I am doing below as I write and comment on these sites.

That would make the next step, which I am now moving towards after one year of Spinoff - L3, that of Procreation - L4. Creation of brand new content/ideas/opinion (although often in my case usually set off by a news item/ tech development). So from here on in that will be more my approach I think. Although it would be sacrilege to not oft post links and miss out on keeping track of and sharing exposure of all the greatness out there.

Anyway, I started this post to compare and contrast some of the popular news & content aggregation sites which are like custom built RSS Feeds of what others are looking at. I think with your own RSS Reader covering all your own personal sources of interest + use of a pop aggregator you are pretty well covered.

So a few I use here:

The first for content: The weblist.net
“What people are clicking on today”
Visit site Here

Popurls
Is a quite similar site
“Popular url’s to the latest web buzz”
Visit Site Here

Another is Alltop - a site aggregating access to news separated by topic, but also key online identities (in a section called Alltop egos): Alltop (beta)
“We’ve got egos covered”
Alltop is an aggregation start up by Guy Kawasaki
Visit site Here

Url’s must be getting short though as the twists and extra letter addition to one word options become commonplace… Another, with a strong personalisation element is Tiinker

Readwrite web commented on Tiinker Here

Can’t see much more value different than a shared page from an RSS Reader, just another app to monitor/update e.g. My shared page here does much the same.

This deserves its own post but I will mention it twice:

“Google may be a bit late to the local news game, but the results are far superior to other sources. “
Read Here: Google news goes local