It's Not About Aggregation It's About Congregation

On Om Malik's site today, Jordan Mitchell had a great comment....

He said:

"With the explosion of content on the Web, it’s not at all about aggregation, hyper-aggregation or even hyper-mega-aggregation. It’s also not about the echo chamber formed by the 1% of users who actually contribute.

It’s about congregation. The content that’s important to me is the content that is important to other people like me, determined passively not actively."

Now in truth, aggregation and congregation can be used synonymously however, I think there is an important nuance to what Jordan is trying to say (or I could be completely wrong and doing some over analytical girl thing.....:-).

It is a myth that technology simplifies our life. In fact, often times it makes it even more complex. More information, more to do, more ways to do it, more to keep up with. Active can be a beautiful thing because it implies a certain degree of your own control which is always a good thing. But on the other hand, what I think Jordon is eluding to is the fact that by now, shouldn't technology be at a point where it becomes smarter for me? Can't it passively do things for me without me having to do all the work?

I think it is amusing to note, if not a bit depressing, that ad delivery systems seem to get smarter and smarter by the second. I mean when i think about the resources thrown towards making ad delivery smarter it pretty much baffles the mind. I betya if that much money was thrown at a medical problem, we might have solved the whole cancer thing by now. So maybe it is naive for me to want people to put that same effort into passive delivery systems that i actually benefit from (vs. someone else's business model....) but a girl can still hope can't she?

Regardless, I like where Jordan is going. Like the song lyrics from Oliver say, I think I'd better think it out again.