Darwinian Web
Adam Green's thoughts on the evolution of the Internet

Posts tagged as: social_architecture

Is a planet a splog?

Posted on Friday, December 16, 2005 at 9:43 AM (permalink)

I continue to be puzzled by the ethics surrounding RSS aggregators. I have been planning on building an RSS 'river of news' aggregator for Ruby, and my research has brought up the aggregators called planets, which aggregate full feeds from a large number of blogs. I've looked at many of these planet sites, and none of them have a description of the relationship between the aggregator and the aggregatees. Did they all choose to be included or did the aggregator simply add them to a list? Are these planets really splogs? They don't appear to be, because they aren't plastered with ads.