Though a number of the people in this class would like us to focus entirely on designing Web pages, I have to now remind you that this is a JOURNALISM course and, as such, we have to also talk about that topic.

So in this final section we'll quickly look at the trend among news sites on the Web to aggregate, in this case meaning to simply cull various other sites for their items and link to them, as opposed to going to the time and expense (via staff, etc.) of producing original content. At one extreme of this continuum are original content producers like G21 and Salon. Moving further along the continuum are Web sites that produce the majority of their content, like the New York Times or BBC, but also use information from wire services and other publications. At the extreme other end are sites that produce little or no original content, like Plastic.com and Slashdot.org.

Aggregators come in many forms, of course. As the second two groupings show. Some organizations, like the Hindustan Times, aggregate as a service to their readers and do it in ways that enhance their own presentation. Notice in the example used to link us to the Hindustan Times on the right how they use aggregation's techniques to provide better in-depth looks at world opinion on this subject. That's excellent work indeed, in the spirit of the medium!

From the point of view of those of you only concerned with Web design, what's of interest in this trend is that most aggregators rely on databases for the design and delivery of their data. This gives them the advantage of not spending the hours that someone like me spends on producing and editing content, while also giving them a template in which large, vast, qualities of information can be automatically entered, displayed and then extracted.

Thus databases have proven extremely powerful tools for Web publishing. One of the pre-eminent and often imitated Web sites that has taken this approach is Slashdot.org. Slashdot was developed by a university student in Massachusetts named Rob ("Commander Taco") Malda, who has since made Slashcode available to other Webmaster/designers. (Rob is from Michigan and has since graduated.) The site itself is now owned by VA Software(formerly VA Linux), a California company, that bought it from the former Andover News Network. [DISCLAIMER: Your lecturer is a former columnist and employee of VA Linux. Comments about Slashdot should not be taken as either an endorsement or criticism of what that Web organization does.] Slashcode is also the database at Plastic.com. What you'll see upon visiting both these aggregators, one a technology news Web site for afficionados of the Linux operating system, the other the successor of once-lauded opinion Web site FEED magazine, is that though they do aggregate news stories, the majority of their content is far and away reader commentary. (You can get Slashcode through SourceForge, an Open Source development project.)

This relates directly back to our discussion of the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link ("the WELL") during last week's live session. The seed I was attempting to plant in that discussion is that the idea of conferencing led to community-building. Community building has always been one of the (some say elusive) aims of people using the Web and what most Web sites, whether commercial or informational, claim to be all about.

From the "chat" rooms of AOL (and now Yahoo!) to BBSes and conferences, and now on news Web sites like Slashdot and Plastic (to the largest extent) and the New York Times forums (to a lesser extent) you find vast amounts of the server bandwidth devoted to database forms where users "talk" to each other and the publication's writers about the topic in question. Some people spend almost all of their online time in one flavor or another of these "community" forums.

Think for a moment about the implications of this phenomenon for journalism,in general, and Web journalism specifically.

• What does it means when it's now a convention, i.e. an expected practice, in both print and online journalism for the journalists and columnists to put their contact information -- in the form of their e-mail address -- at the end of every column?
  
  
• What are the implications of most major news organizations running reader forums to discuss what their more prominent contributors have written on topics like a government's pending legislation or its foreign policy --- right here on the WWW --- where anyone on the Web can read those comments or take part themselves?
  
  
• How are the agendas and self-interests of various groups, ethnic, political or social, affected by the give-and-take of these kind of open forums?

As Internet journalists, these are questions and practices which you should ask yourself about and examine.

We'll be discussing these questions and practices in this week's class.

In the next lecture, we'll move on to the uses (and abuses) of multimedia on the WWW. To get a sneak preview right now, go and visit: Atom Films.

Cheers!