The aggregator as a project. The case of BRUTHER

Abstract

The aggregator is one of the defining formats of the World Wide Web. A few lines of code automatically filter out the infinite flow of data that travels through an optical fiber cable at any given time, identifying certain packages of information that are visually transferred to the graphical interface of any internet user. In the first aggregators of the web, devoted to filtering news, the interface transferred headlines and brief extracts of content published in multiple media around specific markers. Whether “war,” “economy” or “Christina Aguilera,” the markers could be as variable as they were expansive, demonstrating this filtering format’s capacity to absorb. These markers were the witnesses of a new form of light editing1 that, rather than outlining the contents, sought to encourage constant updating of it. The aggregator’s end goal was to introduce into the market of attention any new information package captured by the web, and to shift to the users the responsibility of assessing its relevance and deciding on its accessibility.2 Thus, if Google, in its foundation, set out to organize and make available all the information in the world,3 its first aggregator, Google News [Fig. 01], defined the operations that would serve to do this: the comparison of diverse sources, the repetition of terms, the inventory of headlines, the re-tagging of news and the subtraction of content.4