This is an interesting question I came across while surfing the web. Content writing means writing original content. You may like to read What does a content writer do?
But what do content aggregation and content creation main?
According to this article, this is how you explain the two:
- Content aggregation: You extract content from different sources and then publish it without giving credit to the original sources.
- Content curation: You manually go through various links and decide which piece of content you would like to showcase on your blog, and then publish the link to it, with your own comments, attributing completely to the original source.
Interesting. By the way, I must have come this link via a content aggregator, Flipboard.
Though, to read the full article on the link mentioned above, you need to register.
I have written about content curation multiple times. You may like to read 5 benefits of content curation.
These days I do lots of content curation. Even right now in this blog post, I have linked to another article and then I’m quickly adding my own take.
Content curation normally involves gathering multiple links on the same topic. For example, I can publish something like “13 content writing tips shared by content writing experts”, and then I can find 13 different links, publish the links with individual excerpts, giving full credit to the original authors.
But even if you don’t publish multiple links, you’re curating content. If you link to another article or blog post and then add your thoughts, it is also content curation.
What about content aggregation? Many websites use content aggregation but it is mostly automated and content writing doesn’t play much role in that. You probably use a script that crawls the web looking for certain keywords or phrases and when it finds those keywords and phrases, it extracts the content and publishes it on your blog.
Lots of my content is aggregated in this way by other publishers. Sometimes a link back to my website is automatically added, but most of the time, it is not.
I don’t find the concept of content aggregation appealing because one, if you cannot spend enough time to create original and unique content for your business, how can you work hard for your customers and clients, and two, you can never be sure if the content is going to be of good quality.
Content aggregation is mostly used by people who want to make money through advertisements. For them, as long as they enjoy good search engine rankings and as long as people are clicking on ads, it doesn’t really matter how good or bad the content they are aggregating is.
As mentioned above, content aggregation is also used by known aggregators such as Flipboard and Feedly.