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The Daily Beast's BurdenCan Tina Brown show me everything that's great on the Web today?

By Farhad ManjooPosted Thursday, Oct. 9, 2008, at 5:28 PM ET

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I chalk this up to newness: The best aggregators choose stories for a specific, finely targeted audience, and TDB doesn't yet have an audience. The Huffington Post was in much the same position when it first launched three years ago. "What is its political sensibility?" I wrote at the time. "Who are its target readers? Are they people who like politics, or people who like art, or technology? Why should you read it, and what should you do with what you've read once you're done? Most important: Why would you go back?"

In the years since, HuffPo has found an answer to that question: "that one." It has transformed itself into a lean, mean, Obama-loving political news machine, a site that finds and dissects big political stories more quickly than most full-fledged news organizations. You can scoff at HuffPo's bias—just as you can at Drudge's—but you can't question its journalistic importance to its target readers. Take a look, for instance, at the page that the site assembled for this week's presidential debates. Starting a few hours before the debate, HuffPo's minions began pulling together bits from big and small newspapers, the AP, Slate, Politico, the Obama campaign's Web site, and YouTube to assemble a full guide to the festivities. Then it updated the page during the debate with a live blog. The result was not especially pretty to look at, and it wasn't even really objective, but for Obama-leaning political junkies, it was catnip—a page begging to be refreshed. As a result of such pages, HuffPo has seen an amazing increase in traffic over the past year—some metrics put it above Drudge.

The Daily Beast has no detectable partisan lean, and Edward Felsenthal, the site's managing editor, told me that he didn't think he had to cater to a political group to gain an audience. He's right; though a partisan view does seem to boost traffic, some of the best aggregators do well by pursuing other audiences. Fark caters to people who like stupid stories about, say, mishaps involving transsexuals or the perils of driving a lawnmower while drunk. Jason Kottke has a curatorial sense matched to folks who watch The Wire and read Michael Lewis, Malcolm Gladwell, and David Foster Wallace. Different aggregators for different people, then. When I asked Felsenthal to describe TDB's audience, he was more vague; he said his mission was to point to stuff that's "provocative and essential." If the Daily Beast does well, that designation will get more concrete over time. Certainly Tina Brown knows about building an editorial sensibility.

The other way to build an aggregator is through machines, and it's in this area we've seen the most progress recently. Google News uses computers to analyze the text, publication date, and length of news stories to determine the biggest news of the day. Techmeme and Memeorandum, which were both created by programmer Gabe Rivera, monitor link patterns to come up with a list of the most-blogged stories of the day. Digg and its social-news brothers seek to measure enthusiasm for a story; they let you vote on what you like, and the most-popular stories float to the front page.

On all of these sites, the computers are attempting to bring some automation to the quintessentially human act of editing. Tina Brown got famous by assigning magazine stories that hit a nerve with the public. Digg uses the crowd to do something very similar—by collecting the input of thousands of readers, it shows off stories that it knows will hit a nerve with readers. At this year's TechCrunch50 conference, several startups showed off technology that they say will filter and edit the Web even more efficiently.

The interest in automated aggregation reflects the field's economic appeal. As Google proved, finding a way to present people with a link to exactly what they want can be a very lucrative endeavor. Still, I bet that we'll be relying on both human- and computer-curated sites for some time. I notice a lot of overlap in the many different aggregators I check out each day, but there are also many stories that only one or two of the sites have posted. Digg is by far the best place online to find a hilarious YouTube video. On the other hand, if someone's written something compelling about David Foster Wallace, you're more likely to find it on Kottke. If your interests are diverse, it still makes sense to keep hitting reload on every aggregator in town.

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Farhad Manjoo is Slate's technology columnist and the author of True Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society. You can e-mail him at and follow him on Twitter.

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