The Daily Beast's BurdenCan Tina Brown show me everything that's great on the Web today?

The Daily BeastEarly every morning, I open my Web browser and load up a half-dozen "aggregator" sites: Techmeme, Memeorandum, Real Clear Politics, Google News, the Drudge Report, and the Huffington Post. This is my first sortie into the day's news, the way I orient myself to what's going on in the world now that I no longer subscribe to a print newspaper. After picking clean the smorgasbord of links, I dip into a second set of sites, these pulling in quirkier tales from around the Web: Digg, BuzzFeed, Fark, Hacker News, Boing Boing, and Kottke as well as my personalized Web aggregators at Friendfeed and Google Reader. During the course of the day, I repeat this process often; in my manic hunt for the freshest stuff on the Web, I reload some of these sites 10 or 20 times each. No wonder Tina Brown decided to start her own Web aggregator. Even if other people are only a fraction as reload-happy as I am, these sites are click magnets.

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Brown's new venture, the Daily Beast, launched this week. It's still too soon to assess its place in the online firmament—new Web sites change radically over time, and though I think TDB does some things well, there's much it could improve. (My favorite feature is "The Big Fat Story," a daily chart that outlines different viewpoints on a contentious topic in the news—Barack Obama's connection to Bill Ayers, for instance, or the press's effect on the markets.) It's telling that the former editor of The New Yorker and Vanity Fair is now running a Web aggregator. Her entry into the business highlights these sites' leading role in how we get our news. My dream site—a meta-aggregator that sifts through all my favorite aggregators and picks out the stories that it can tell I'll love—still doesn't exist (that's why I've got to keep refreshing so many different URLs), but all of the investment in the field suggests that it might not be far off.

"Does the world really need another news aggregator?" Brown asks in an entertaining introductory FAQ. She answers by asserting that, actually, her site "doesn't aggregate." Instead, in addition to providing a smattering of original content, the Daily Beast "sifts, sorts, and curates. We're as much about what's not there as what is."

But Brown protests too much. Aggregating carries no shame: Sites that exist primarily to link to other sites embody the Web in its purest form. Linking is the soul of the Web, and the companies that recognized this early have seen enormous success. (Yahoo was a thriving Web directory before it was a corporate tragedy.) The online-news business came to prominence on the back of outbound links—you may have first visited Matt Drudge's page for unsourced Clinton administration gossip, but if you kept coming back, it was for his irresistible tabloid eye. (If you can read a Drudge headline like "Fury Over Cat-Eating Festival ..." without clicking, you're made of stronger stuff than I. And if you can't hold back, here's a handy hint for navigating aggregators: If you've got a newish Web browser, click the link with your middle mouse button—the scroll wheel—to open the story in another tab. Now the cat-eating story can wait until you're done reading this.)

Brown is correct that all aggregators are as much about what they omit as what they include. Omission, indeed, is their primary feature—you go to the Daily Beast or BuzzFeed or HuffPo because they've already scanned through the news, gossip, funny videos, games, and assorted ephemera that hits the Internet each day and will presumably give you just the good stuff. In this light, "Does the world need another aggregator?" is as silly a question as "Does the world need another map?" The answer is always yes—different people need different guides for different purposes. And as the Web expands, with more people posting ever-stupider stuff each day, we're only going to need more, and better, aggregators.

Generally speaking, there are two kinds of aggregators—those produced by people, and those produced by machines. The Daily Beast is made by people. The staff scouts the Web and pulls together the best stuff into a "Cheat Sheet," a list of "must-reads from all over." It's a comprehensive effort, but in its beta form, the "Cheat Sheet" seems to miss much of the Web. It's composed mainly of stories from big outlets around the world—the New York Times, Politico, Bloomberg, etc. So far, there hasn't been much stuff from YouTube, Flickr, right- or left-wing discussion sites, or some dude's blog.

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Farhad Manjoo is Slate's technology columnist and the author of True Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society. You can e-mail him at and follow him on Twitter.

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