Aggregator? What's an Aggregator?

"Think of the Web as a world-wide pile of paper. Some of those pieces of paper have interesting writing on them, some have pictures, and some have unintelligible marks that look like words but make no sense. An aggregator is a clipping service.

A clipping service sorts through journals, newspapers, and other publications; extracts the items of interest; bundles them together and drops the lot of them on your desk. You skim through the clippings....

An aggregator takes a feed, generally published in the RSS format, collects it, collates it — optionally folds, spindles, and mutilates it — and presents it for your reading pleasure. Depending on the aggregator you use, some of these things will be more or less possible. But the general function is the same.

If there's something really interesting, you might save it. Often you'll run across an item that you know will interest someone else, so you pass it on to them, often with comments." [The Peanut Gallery]

Will summarizes nicely an IM coversation we had a few weeks ago. Actually, it was pretty much him explaining this concept and me just agreeing with him. I'm glad he posted this, because it's a good way to describe news aggregators to the uninitiated. (Note to self for future presentations.)

Has anyone scraped Instapundit to create an RSS feed? I can't keep up with Glenn manually, so I'd love to shifted him into my aggregator.