The Perfect Pleasure of Link Aggregation

Every so often, someone high up at Google remarks about how large their index has grown.  From a tiny 2 billion to a nice 6 billion, from 6 billion to 10 billion, and from 10 billion to who knows what.  There are even predictions that the Web is set to dramatically increase as social networks and blogs continue to power growth.

Given the billions and billions of pages out there, it's not surprising that this past year has seen a number of link aggregation services crop up.  First of course, there are the "link lists" as I'd like to call them.  Old standbys, like
Slashdot and Metafilter have been around for years, but it was their more innovative brethren, like Digg and

Reddit, that truly made this genre explode (yes, I know Reddit is currently
significantly smaller than Slashdot, but from what I can tell it's trajectory is pointed upward).  Then we have the meta-aggregators, like Original Signal and
Popurls, that take RSS feeds from both blog posts and the aforementioned link lists and make their own blocks of links.  These are also helpful – for those of us that have yet to go crazy with RSS readers (such as myself), these provide a nice pre-packaged in-between.

Now, as I said, the proliferation of billions upon billions of pages necessitates that we use services such as these, services that take all all the crud out there, strips the wheat from the chaff, and then serves it to us in meaningful, digestible ways.  But that's when we arrive at what I call, “The Perfect Pleasure of Link Aggregation“.

I take the term "the Perfect Pleasure" from Oscar Wilde, found in the Picture of Dorian Gray:

"A cigarette is the perfect type of a
perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied."
- Lord Henry

Link aggregation services are exactly like that: they give us all the great news on the Web, but running through all the new links a service has to offer can take as little as 30 minutes.  For the avid Internet junkie, 30 minutes is but a sliver of the time we spend online in any given day.  By serving all of the best new links on a silver platter, link aggregators allow us to gorge on news indiscriminately, and by the end of our experiences we are left, as was Lord Henry with his cigarette, unsatisfied.

There could be two issues here: either our link aggregation services aren't scouring enough of the Web to keep us completely satisfied (something, given Digg's breadth and popularity, I find decreasingly likely), or there just isn't enough on the Web out there that's really that interesting (maybe 2 billion of those 6 billion pages is full of stuff like
this…).

So really, either there needs to be a better, faster Digg, or the Internet needs to become more interesting and much larger much faster much sooner.  Right?

Of course, I left out a third option – maybe I spend too much time online.  That, my friends would tell me, is what the problem is.  So if you, like me, find all of these services increasingly frustrating, perhaps it's worth wondering whether you should just get off the computer once in a while.  As for me, I'll just keep on complaining.

Darshan is a Web developer and co-founder of ImagineEasy Solutions, LLC, an educational software firm.