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<html>
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  <title>Model 4: Web Hub/Aggregator</title>
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    <td align="left"><h2>Model 4: Web Hub/Aggregator</h2></td>
    <td align="right"><a href="slide-7.html">Prev</a> | <a href="slide-9.html">Next</a></td>
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  <img src="img/business-4.gif" />
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<blockquote>

Finding the information that you want on the web is sometimes a pain
in the ass.  In the bad old days before <a
href="http://www.google.com/">Google</a> users could spend hours
clicking through the 1 million results that <a
href="http://www.altavista.com/">AltaVista</a> would return to search
terms as esoteric as, "Shaving a HedgeHog with a Pound of Cotton
Candy".  For those of us who remember those days and for people who
can't seem to settle on one place to do their shopping or investing
there is the Aggregator services.  These websites take content from
all around the web and assemble it in one place.  While a search
engine is the most commonly used form of an Aggregator, services like
<a href="http://news.google.com/">Google News</a> take information
feeds from all over the world and assemble it in one easily searched
location.  The <a href="">RSS</a> standard was designed to meet the
needs of these types of aggregating organizations.  If it's important
to get your message out you can publish it as an RSS data stream and
your content will appear on other people's websites throughout the
world.<br /><br />

This diagram discusses the development and promotion of an engineering
standard for data exchange.  This may be naive or far-thinking
depending on who you talk to.  There already exists a very popular
exchange standard which is constantly being abused worldwide.  The
lingua franca (as a reflective pretentious ass I wonder if that is the
right term) of the web is HTML.  Screen Scraping is the process of
grabbing an HTML document and cleverly extracting just the information
you want from it.  One of my friend's has a company who aggregates
investor's information on one website.  They do this without the
express approval of those websites.  The method?  They store your
login information, login into the site as you, take the HTML document
that is sent to them, and cleverly scrape out all the information they
want.  They then store this in their database.  When you log in to
their financial portal the information from the ten websites you trade
through is located in one spot.  People pay money for this sort of
service and it didn't require the development of a new standard, it
just involves a practice which pisses of a bunch of investing
companies.

<ul>

  <li><a href="http://www.google.com/">Google.com</a>: A website so
      wildly popular that it redefined advertising on the web and
      became a verb.  This is pretty impressive for a website which
      doesn't seem to try and market itself.  This website has many
      services, among them <a href="http://www.google.com">an amazing
      text search engine</a>, <a href="http://images.google.com/">a
      pretty good image search engine</a>, <a
      href="http://groups.google.com/">a complete history of
      Usenet</a>, and <a href="http://news.google.com/">a collection
      of news stories from hundreds of different sources</a>.  They
      generate very little of their own content, but cleverly harness
      the content of everyone else in the world to bring you
      semi-useful advertisements.  I, who loathe to support internet
      advertisements in any form (I was once burned by the "Punch the
      Monkey" advertisement) have followed one or two of Google's ads.
      This website is wildy successful by most definitions and
      continues to add new useful features.*</li>

</ul>

<small>* Tristan Cohen is in no way affiliated with Google.com and in
       fact is mortified that a search for his name turns up
       anything.</small>

</blockquote>
<hr>
<a href="tristancohen@yahoo.com">tristancohen@yahoo.com</a>
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</html>
by admin — last modified 2003-04-28 10:12
 

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