Content Aggregators — What Are They, Exactly?
Hello World! Ever wondered how apps such as Flipboard, Google News, LINE Today work in the background? Well, you’ve come to the right place. This is my first post on Medium, so imperfections are sure to occur. You can leave constructive criticism below, so that I may create better content for you in the future. In this post, I will explain everything you need to know about Content Aggregators. Let’s start!
Content Aggregators — What Are They?
Content Aggregators are a new phenomenon. I’m sure we’ve encounter some form of them at one point in our lives. Although the concept may look vague to you right now, it won’t be like so after reading this article. Content Aggregators are an entity (be it a person or an organization or an application) who aggregates content from various content sources. Modern Content Aggregators come in the form of either applications, websites, or other kinds of digital service. The type of content aggregated can be in the form of news, entertainment, blog posts, etc. and come in the form of websites.
Before we dive any deeper, I’ll give you a story for you to understand how these things work. Now, I want to give you a story of Mark, an avid podcast lover who listens to a gazillion podcasts. Mark listens to his podcasts on many devices. On his phone on the subway, his laptop at work, his radio on his car, you name it. He loves to listen to inspirational speakers and discussions that provide him value. He’s also constantly on the lookout for new, up-to-date episodes from his favorite podcasts.
It was all well at the beginning, however Mark noticed a problem as his time goes by. He noticed that he would be checking his favorite podcast’s websites a bit too often, sometimes even multiple times in a day. He eagerly waits for the new releases, the new series, the new episodes. He wastes precious hours of his time each week searching for the next new release from the several dozen websites of his favorite podcasts. The consequences compounded day by day, and Mark was tired of it all. He searched way too much only to find one (or two) new releases each day. It was frustrating.
One day, Mark found a website called Feed. Feed is a Content Aggregator that gathers desired content from various sources using some sort of a “subscription” model. Feed learns from users data and their “subscriptions”. These “subscriptions” are basically which media outlet the user follows the publications of. Users can choose their subscriptions from their list of favorite media outlets.
Feed provides fresh content from Mark’s subscriptions list. This way, Mark no longer need to constantly visit dozens of sites each day. The Content Aggregator enables Mark to catch up with fresh releases from his favorite podcast instantly, saving him lots of valuable time. Mark can now keep up with the newest podcast releases and remain productive at the same time. Modern problems require modern solutions.
Now back to our discussion on Content Aggregators. Content Aggregators, as we’ve already learned earlier in this article, are entities who aggregate content. Although content aggregating can be done manually, most of Content Aggregators nowadays use technologies to aggregate content. The technology they use is RSS, an abbreviation for “Really Simple Syndication.”
RSS are simply text-like files that can be used to create RSS Feeds. RSS Feeds contains updates of specific websites, thus enabling the user to keep up with their favorite website’s updates. It’s almost like Instagram, but for websites. Each time a website “posts” or uploads a new article or podcast, the RSS Feed will give updates to you, the user, in the form of the article’s URL and it’s content.
Content Aggregators like Feed uses RSS to create an RSS Feed, which provides the user up to date content from user’s favorite websites. Some real world examples of Content Aggregators are Feedly and Inoreader. LINE Today, Flipboard, BaBe are also everyday examples of Content Aggregators (specifically, they are called “News Aggregators”). LINE Today, for example, doesn’t create it’s own content. It only aggregates (hence the term “Content Aggregator”) news from various sources for a better user experience.
Conclusion
In short, Content Aggregators checks your favorite sites for content updates and they will provide you a practical way of keeping updated with the latest content from your favorite sources.
