‘Taming the Machine: Content Aggregation With a Human Touch’ – ‘Website Magazine’ Article
Jeffrey Broesche says, “Content aggregators collect, analyze and repackage vast amounts of information and data, and there are many ways in which they do it. Sites such as The Huffington Post employ editors to review content and decide which pieces to republish. Digg and sites like it rely on editors’ choices but overlay a community vetting process that raises or lowers an article’s profile through user voting. Reddit is user contributed and user vetted. What all these sites share is human intervention somewhere in the aggregation process. Be it via an editor or the crowd, these sites depend on human evaluation to select and prioritize what their users see.
Automated aggregation, although less labor intensive day to day, is in many ways more difficult to pull off. Whereas HuffPo and even Reddit can rely on human intelligence to prevent, spot and correct simple factual errors or typos, machine aggregators must be designed with adequate foresight to ensure quality results”.
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