Blogging Roller: The Weblog Community Aggregator.

The Weblog Community Aggregator.

A new type of web site is becoming popular in the weblogging world: the Community Aggregator. A Community Aggregator is a portal-like web application that displays weblog posts from a group of closely related but separately hosted weblogs and provides synthetic newsfeeds so that readers may subscribe to the group as a whole.

I'm not sure where this concept originated. The first such site that I recall is Javablogs, but others have suggested that Blawgistan was one of the the first and that O'Reilly had a community aggregator in 2000. I'm not sure when weblogs.oreilly.com came online. O'Reilly's Meerkat came online in 2000, but it does not really fit my definition of a community aggregator.

Portal like experience for web browsers. Web browsing visitors who visit a Community Aggregator experience a portal-like web site centered around the display of the most general of the synthesized newsfeeds.

Other information included on the portal page might include list of links to the weblogs included in the aggregator and display of other newsfeeds of interested to the community. For example, an open source software project might display the newsfeed from the project's bug tracking system and the newsfeed from the project's build system on the sidebar of the portal page.

Synthesized feeds for newsreaders. Synthesized newsfeeds are intended for users of newsreader software such as FeedDemon, NewNewsWire, or SharpReader. The synthesized feeds allow you to subscribe to the community as a whole instead of picking out specific individual weblogs.

The owners of an aggregation site might set some rules to limit which weblogs are included in the synthesized newsfeeds and what type of weblog entries are included in the feed. For example, community aggregation site javablogs.com allows anybody to sign up to be included on the site and asks only that included weblogs be primarily about Java. O'Reilly Weblogs includes only O'Reilly authors. The Planet Apache community aggregator allows only weblogs belonging to members of the Apache Software Foundation.

Features useful in a Community Aggregator:

Allow users to mark weblogs as favorite-blogs or ignored-blogs.
Count clicks on each weblog entry.
Allow users to design their own synthesized feeds.
Allow administrator to "pin" weblog entries to the top of the page.
Download subscription list as OPML
Weblogs.com API RPC interface
Search API RPC interface
Portal-like web UI

Examples of Community Aggregator sites:

Community Aggregator software

Spycroll - Python blog aggregator used by some "Planet" sites?
http://planetplanet.org - is this the future home of the software that drives the various "Planet" sites?
Monologue - ASP.Net application that drives the Monologue site.

Online aggregators and build your own feed sites:

Weblog servers with Community Aggregator-like features:

I was attempting to explain what a community aggregator was for my talk next month and ended up with the above article. Thanks to Ted Leung or Planet Apache and Mike Cannon-Brookes of Javablogs, who both helped out by answering my questions. If you know more about the history of community aggregators or can provide other examples of sites or software, please leave a comment.

Dave Johnson in Blogging • 🕒 04:18AM Feb 01, 2004

Tags: Blogging

Comments:

You forgot blagg coupled with blosxom as an application that will do community aggregation.

Posted by John Beimler on February 02, 2004 at 10:42 AM EST #

See also the Living in China aggregator.

Posted by mg on February 02, 2004 at 06:55 PM EST #

[Trackback] For quite some time I've had the idea of aggregating Pinoy blogs, like java.blogs and linux.blogs (I think it's a Movable Type installation hacked up to look like java.blogs) . Since Blogger recently announced Atom for free Blogger/Blogspot ...

Posted by What is Not on February 05, 2004 at 12:02 PM EST #

One other community aggregator (which I'm currently using) is Jodrell's my planet. Also another "planet" site that you forgot was planet gnome. This was pretty much the first spycroll/Planet Planet site.

Posted by daveg on February 05, 2004 at 09:02 PM EST #

Planet Planet already has their devel sources up. No open source Java aggregator yet...

Posted by Migs on February 13, 2004 at 08:42 AM EST #

Very informative and through details. Allow me to add the following information. In certain countries in the middle east where many writers/bloggers get prosecuted, tortured and jailed for free speech and progressive ideas. Such portals/planets ...etc helped pave the way to actually reach the readers worldwide Many got banned, many were forced to shutdown since some governments fearing more free speech talk will cause unrest. Qwaider Planet, is one, but there are others like "Jordan Planet"-Now closed, Bahrainiblogs.net, dwwen and others. I didn't like to post links here, since that would probably be considered spam

Posted by Qwaider Planet on January 09, 2007 at 10:03 PM EST #

See also FeedCluster.com, which lets you create community aggregators.

Posted by Mark on November 21, 2008 at 05:14 PM EST #