"Planet Neuroscientists" is a famous website who tries to clone the concept of “planet gnome”. Planet gnome is a website of the Open Source community with the aim to combine existing blogs into a larger one. This is done with the software “planet” which is a script who puts single RSS feeds into a mixed meshup.
"Planet Neuroscientists" is doing the same but for content from within science journals. Important sources on the website are Science news, Retraction watch, For better science, Elsevier connect and other. All these websites a blogs with a larger audience and they are feed into the planet neuroscience aggregator to reach a larger audience. In the media theory this concept is called news aggregation. But why is this needed in the age of fulltext search engines?
To answer this question we have to describe what the weakness of Google is. Google is a fulltext engine and an archive at the same time. If the user types in a keyword he gets the results back to the 1990s. He can reduce the result page to hits from the last month, but Google lacks in indexing current information. The second problem is, that the media companies have the fear that Google will destroy their business model so they are not trust the search engine.
From a technical perspective a content aggregator is a potential alternative to a fulltext search engine. What a content aggregator is providing is a list of URLs to content stored elsewhere. And the content aggregator can decide which links and in which order are displayed. So it seems, that apart from a search engine there is a need for such planet-like websites. But can this concept be made more interesting? Let us take a look what most newspapers are providing apart from the original content to their readers. All the major newspapers have below an article a comment section in which they become feedback from the reader. The question is how to use a content aggregator, a corpus of blogs and the comment section into one website. One option for doing so is facebook, that's the reason why Facebook is loved by journals. Apart from Facebook other social networks are available in which users can post links and write comments.