Way back in 1997 I was one of dozens of lots of web designers trying to figure out how to bring an editorial voice to the internet. The web had taken off and there pages and links everywhere but few places where they were actually organized in a useful manner. As I've written before, in December of that year I started a weekly updated list of annotated links to articles on nonviolence, a form we'd now would recognize as a blog.
About eighteen months ago I started a "links blog" of interesting Quaker links, incorporated as a sidebar on my popular "QuakerRanter" personal blog. I eventually gave the links their own URL (QuakerQuaker.org) and invited others to join the linking. I always stumble when trying to tell people what QuakerQuaker is all about. The best definition is that its a "collaboratively edited blog aggregator" but that's a horribly tech description.
The rise of blogs is creating the necessity for these sort of theme-based aggregators. This morning I stumbled on Original Signal, a new site that organzes the best Web 2.0 blogs. A site called PopURLs does the same for "the latest web buzz." A site called SolutionWatch has written about these in Tracking the web with Single Page Aggregators. We're all on to something here. I suspect that sometime this fall some clever person will coin a new term for these sites.
