The Lazy Man's (or Woman's) Shortcut to Finding Good Content on the Web: Content Aggregators

The Web is a big place - we're all pretty aware of that by now. Fortunately, there are some smart folks out there who figured out how to put a whole bunch of really great news and content sites on one convenient page. The name for this timesaver? A content aggregator.

Basically, these aggregators take the most updated content from a handful of popular sites (or sites organized around central topics) and present them all in one place for easy access. Lazy? Lazy like a fox! Here are a few of my favorite content aggregators:

• Popurls: One of the very first content aggregators, started by Thomas Marban back in 2006. Lots of popular sites are featured here, including Digg, Flickr, Twitter, and more.
• Alltop: A project from Guy Kawasaki. Alltop presents you with a variety of topics and showcases popular sites underneath those topics. This is a great way to find niche sites for your particular interests, by the way.
• newsflashr: News junkies will love newsflashr. Choose the topic you're interested in from the tag cloud and you'll see the latest updates; you can also click on the top categories (world, sports, technology, etc) and find the latest news that way.
• RSSMeme: A content aggregator with a bit of a twist. RSSMeme takes the most popular shared items from Google Reader and makes them available to everyone on the same page. You won't necessarily be looking at the most popular content on the Web, per se, but you'll be getting a good idea of what a large segment of people are reading via RSS at any given time.

There's also Tailrank and Techmeme; Tailrank presents the reader with categorical news content while Techmeme focuses primarily on the technology angle.