As I wrote in my last post, it would be relatively easy for aggregation sites to understand when many people are talking about the same book – though the people are linking, based on their values, to different booksellers. This is because books have a unique identifier (the ISBN) that appears in the URLs for many online booksellers.

The problem gets stickier when we’re trying to aggregate something that doesn’t have unique identifiers: like news. What if three of us are talking about the recent (to me depressing) U.S. elections, and one of us links to ZNet, one to The Onion, and one to The New American? There’s no unique identifier for this, and I don’t think the solution would be for us to all link to “the paper of record” (in the U.S., The New York Times) because it wouldn’t fit with our values. Also, depending on our values, we may not even think the same things are news (certainly the Times and I often disagree on this front).

Of course, Google is trying to do news aggregation as we speak. . .

This entry was posted on Friday, November 15th, 2002 at 3:56 pm and is filed under old-hyperfiction-blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.