Democratising agggregation

Fred Wilson has a post today that celebrates aggregation. I agree that aggreagators have changed the media landscape. Similar to Fred, I no longer consume my news via direct visits to the sources of the news. Instead, I rely on my aggregators such as Hacker news, Techmeme, Twitter etc to highlight interesting news before visiting the source directly.

However, the current technical barrier to creating aggregators is still quite high. This has limit aggregation to the realm of startups. Why is this so? We are all curators in our own areas. We just need a simple service to help us organise our curations and share with it with whoever that wants it.

It is with this line of thinking that we decided to create a service that democratise the aggregation process. We built something that anyone, without technical background, can create an aggregator in less than 5 minutes. Best of all, we created a parser that not only retrieves and sorts text, but image as well. Here is a screenshot of a food aggregator that I have created called SgFoodie. It curates the feeds of Singapore food blogs and creates a Tastyspotting page, without any coding.
















The business model is still tentative but here is what the team will be rolling out. For users who want complete control of their aggregators, they can pay a basic subscription fee. For users who doesn't want to pay the fees, the team will be handling the advertising for the aggreators and sharing the revenue with the site creator.

This service will go live next month and the team is looking for early users. If you are interested to try some aggregation of your own, just drop a comment and we will be keeping you in our mailing list.

Thoughts, comments or feedback?

Posted in: Personal