Nearly everyone, especially students, has had the frustrating experience of sorting through page after page of Google results to no avail.
To cut down on time spent hunched over the computer, increasingly popular Web sites known as online aggregators hope to alleviate the information overload of the Internet, by bringing relevant information together and separating wheat from chaff.
An online aggregator functions by culling together related information for easier consumption, be it reviews, blogs or any other form of media that occurs in overabundance on the Internet, as evidenced in Web sites like Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, Hype Machine and Elbows.
“The more decentralized and spread out things become, the more dire need there is for an aggregator for that particular area of content,” said Moscow-born New Yorker Anthony Volodkin, founder of Hype Machine, a music blog aggregator.
Due to the taste-making nature of these Web sites, and their growing convenience and relevance, they are becoming increasingly popular with college students. Hype Machine in particular can claim 42 percent of their visitors are 18 to 24, and 29 percent are college students, as shown in the results of an ongoing demographic survey. “You can find the entire album or at least the songs you’re looking for. … (Bloggers) are writing intelligent things about new music, they’re just wanting you to check out what’s new. … I seriously go there every single day,” said Hannah Lewis, a second-year economics and music history student.
As many students like Lewis use Hype Machine to discover new music, the site is only gaining momentum. After the site’s redesign in October 2007, it pulls in around 900,000 unique visitors per month, as opposed to last October’s traffic of between 650,000 and 700,000.
And although it can be argued search engines like Google are a certain type of aggregator, these newer sites set themselves apart through their specificity. Because of the needs of the media community they serve, different aggregators do things differently. This trend can be exemplified in the contrasting natures of Metacritic, the review aggregator giant, and the aforementioned Hype Machine.
Both Metacritic and Hype Machine’s overall missions are the same: to bring together relevant information and make it easy to browse for the casual user. But their secondary purposes are different. Metacritic hopes to ultimately hold producers, developers and artists accountable for the quality of their product by assigning a “Metascore,” or weighted average of all collected reviews to each movie, CD or video game.
“I think the end result is that people are going to have to make better games, they’re going to have to make better movies if more and more people just know where the quality is and make better choices,” said California resident Marc Doyle, cofounder and current manager of Metacritic.
The Metascore itself has become particularly influential in the video game industry. “Games industry publishers use the Metascore and actually, they integrated that into contracts with their developers. So, you know, if a particular game gets a low score, then maybe they’ll pay them a little bit less. But that was never the intention,” Doyle said.
On the other hand, the Hype Machine is less concerned with weeding out potential disappointments and more about connecting people with what they want to listen to, serving the important task of pulse finder in an obscenely vast online music community.
“We work to expose the music that people have found interesting online, music that people have found genuinely interesting, and that’s kind of our bar for that. So right now, we’re doing it with blogs, … expos(ing) that to others to see what’s happening and to see what’s interesting and to act as kind of a zeitgeist for what music is exciting today,” Volodkin said.
The daily operation of both sites also is in opposition. Day-to-day work at Metacritic consists of Doyle and his team of four manually checking every one of their included reviewers’ Web sites daily, and then manually assigning new reviews a rating from one to 100, either as a mathematical conversion of a star-based system or as an arbitrary interpretation of a scoreless review.
“We figured coming up with a weighted average would be the best way to do it. … Certain critics we think are a little bit more important than others, so they’ll be weighted a little bit more in the average,” Doyle said.
In addition, they select one pull quote they deem representative of the review as a whole.
When informed of this tactic of site management, Volodkin said, “Really? Metacritic? They get the data manually?” Hype Machine uses a more passive and automated approach to site management.
“So first what happens is someone submits us a blog and we review it to see if it meets certain parameters which we use to figure out if those people writing that music blog really get the vision. … Then we add it to the kind of main set of blogs. Then what happens is every hour we have a system that checks up on the blogs, and if there’s something new, it gets posted, called up, and it gathers data about it, and very, very shortly afterward it makes it to the front page,” Volodkin said.
Due to the overwhelming wealth of easily accessible information on these sites, dedicated fans and users flock to them. What this creates is a thriving social situation on both sites.
Metacritic has a function that allows users to log in and protest review ratings or write reviews of their own.
Hype Machine also has a more explicit social functionality in that it allows users to create their own profile that responds to updates.
“You can either mark tracks that you like, and you can survey them on your list of favorite tracks, or you can mark sources that you like, and we take those sources and we assemble this “love feed” out of them. … We assemble that all into one place,” Volodkin said.
In any case, these immensely powerful sites are changing the way we use the Internet. What was once a morass of data is becoming more concentrated, in response to a growing demand from the media-saturated public.