[Air-L] Looking for examples of aggregation communities

[Rudolf Ammann]

On Sat, Oct 23, 2010, Derek Hansen wrote:

> I'm looking for some examples of communities of volunteers that help
> amalgamate a collection of materials rather than create them

Hi -- the earliest bloggers, in the 1998 to 2000 era, were very much a
volunteer network of  information scavengers who aimed to "filter the
Net".

I've written two conference papers about this network, one chiefly on
the man who envisaged the network and brought it into being:

<http://tawawa.org/ark/p/jorn-barger-community.html>

The other paper is about the process through which the network
coalesced, which turned out to be citation for re-propagated links:

<http://www.asna.ch/fileadmin/user_upload/2010/Papers/Ammann_paper.pdf>

> The participants are called "curators" and their main role is to validate
> and approve content rather than create it

Possibly of interest: The notion of curating came to be applied to
blogging in 1999 at the latest:

<http://oddfish.co.uk/2010/08/17/is-curating-the-new-editing/#comment-4>

Best,

Rudolf Ammann

UCL Centre of Digital Humanities