Aggravated by Aggregation?

The Huffington Post is infamous for aggregation of news: lifting facts and information from other stories and rewriting them on their own site. Google News, which I love and use all the time, is a great aggregator of stories I’m interested in. There’s a good discussion on the pros and cons of aggregation at: http://gigaom.com/2011/07/13/like-it-or-not-aggregation-is-part-of-the-future-of-media/. As for me, I do it on my blog all the time, hopefully with due credit to the sources I use. Despite copyrights and such, I know it’s true that one’s unique claim to information reported is good only until another reporter reads it, and finds they can use it from their own, hopefully unique, perspective.

The bottom line for me is this: use and integrate information wherever you find it, but don’t cheat.