Aggregators have been around a while but they only recently are beginning to show up and take a more visible prominence in how people obtain information from the web. Aggregators allow for the consolidation of RSS/XML feeds from blogs, news sources, and commercial entities both private and public. The provide a searchable method of alerting the user as to when keywords show up and allow an extremely convenient method of pinpointing information that you are interested in without having to wade through pages of extraneous data, including popups and advertising (usually). From strictly a time efficiency standpoint I am now completely hooked. Although I will venture to my favorite sites occasionally just to see how things are coming along, I will only do so once every couple of days instead of the constant polling that I was doing before as the relevant content is delivered right to my desktop via 'news' channels. Because of it's customizability and on-demand nature, it is hard to imagine this method not becoming incredibly important to the future of infomation delivery in the future internet. I'm sure text and web pages are only the beginning.
Another reason I think that aggregators MUST be the future is that they provide ways of taking 'atomic' threads of information and arranging them into more complex evolving dynamic structures which communicate with similar structures. Our brains need data, but the volume of information provided on the internet is too large and we need it distilled. Aggregators will be the agents we offload the trivial searching and initial determination of importance to. We will learn to trust these sources as we do our own memory.
Reason has Fight Aging, and ImmInst has its RSS news feed. The Methuselah Mouse Prize has the Toteboard which provides a custom view of some of the most longevity oriented feeds available. It might be a good idea to provide a list of RSS feeds here at ImmInst so that people can use it as a resource when setting up their software as channels can be hard to find. I would suggest using the ones off the MMP toteboard to start.
Here's a paper, already four years old, that really helps put aggregators into perspective.
http://ebiz.mit.edu/.....v20 FINAL.pdf
Although there are more than a free aggregators out there.. I'm using one called Newzcrawler which is not..
http://www.newzcrawler.com
another good one I hear is Amphetadesk (free)
http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/
