All the major social networks have something in common. Facebook groups, Reddit groups and Google+ groups are working with the same philosophy in mind. The groups containing something which is described as news aggregation. But how exactly is the groups game working?
Let us simplify the world a bit and suppose that in a intranet the only website which is available is a mediawiki installation. Mediawiki has the advantage that the software is open source and all activities in the wiki are tracked in realtime. It's easier to watch inside the box to describe what news aggregation is about. We need apart from the wiki itself, some motivated people who are creating new articles in the wiki and modifying existing one. Around 10 users are doing so and the wiki growths.
Content aggregation means to observe the tab with the last changes. One category of changes is more important it is the newly created articles. An example logfile could look the following:
2019-05-01 N linefollowingrobot, URL
2019-05-01 N programmingexample, URL
2019-05-03 N profilpage of user3 was created, URL
2019-05-04 N neural networks tutorial in python, URL
The N stands for new page and is used in most wikis to tag the edits. Each added article has a creation date, a title and a URL. News aggregation means to monitor, comment and repost this list. That means a news wiki page is created called “news of the day” and if in the logfile something relevant happens the URL is copied to the news page. The “news of the day” section has to look the following way:
2019-05-01 linefollowingrobot, URL, boring article
2019-05-01 programmingexample, URL, sounds nice, comments needed
2019-05-03 profilpage of user3 was created, URL, hello user3
It is the same list, with some minor modification. The last item was forget to mention, because the aim is to get the news list as short as possible.
With this background knowledge it is possible to explain what content aggregation means and how complicated the process is for doing so. The amount of work which has to be invest to convert the existing logfile into a news section is very small. If the editor is lazzy he copies all the entries and adds some context information. This can be done in under 1 minute.
Social networks like Facebook, Reddit and Google+ are doing the same thing. They are creating a news section of the entire internet which contains of an URL and a title. The idea is, that the user will read the news and visit the url. How many users are doing so in reality is unclear, what we can say for sure is, that creating a news section for a wiki is an easy task. A single person can do so for a large Mediawiki installation with investing less than 1 minute work. The more demanding task is to create all the content which is done by the 100 users. For example if somebody want's to write the linefollowingrobot wiki page he has to invest many hours before the text was written.