Web aggregators select and present content culled from multiple sources, playing an important taste-making and promotional role. Larger aggregators are starting to compete with mainstream news sources but a new class of niche and do-it-yourself aggregators are organizing around specific interests. Niche aggregators harness the power of the internet to build communities previously separated by geography or institutional inertia. These micro-communities serve a trend-setting role. Understanding their operation is critical for those wanting to understand or predict cultural change and for those who want to harness the power of the long tail by catering to niches.
Martin Kelley is a South Jersey web designer. He started his career as editor at an activist book publisher and moved onto the web as an obvious way to reach a larger audience on a limited budget. He started Nonviolence.org in 1995 and re-launched it as a proto-blog in late 1997. A links blogon his personal website evolved into the niche aggregator QuakerQuaker.org in early 2006. It is now collaboratively edited, built on a mash-up of over a dozen Web 2.0 services.
