When Digg introduced a new toolbar in early April that added a thin strip – known as a ‘frame’ – to the top of pages submitted to Digg, a publisher outcry forced the social media aggregator to back down. It modified the new DiggBar so that only logged-in users would view submitted stories within a Digg frame and Web address, and also offered them the option to turn off the toolbar altogether.

But despite Digg’s move, the controversial practice of framing seems to be making a comeback on the Web. Danny Sullivan, editor of the Web site Searchengineland.com wrote in an article about Digg’s toolbar changes, that Facebook, Ask.com and StumbleUpon have all begun framing links recently.

Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen argues that “frames break the fundamental user model of the web page.” “All of a sudden, you cannot bookmark the current page and return to it (the bookmark points to another version of the frameset), URLs stop working, and printouts become difficult. Even worse, the predictability of user actions goes out the door: who knows what information will appear where when you click on a link?”

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Techmeme is one of the sites that Robert Thomson, managing editor of the The Wall Street Journal, presumably thinks is a “parasite” or “tech tapeworm in the intestines of the Internet.”

The Web site aggregates links to stories. Along with the links is a short description of the news. Thomson and others in the newspaper industry say it’s unfair and unlawful for Web sites to profit from their content without compensating them. On the same day that Thomson made his comments, William Dean Singleton, chairman of the The Associated Press, sized up how many in print journalism feel about sites that aggregate news: “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore.”

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Hey, guys, news flash: Twitter is good for something.

This morning, I crawled out of bed and headed to the kitchen to make coffee, but upon turning on the faucet, I noticed that the water flowing out of it was a sketchy brown shade. Not good–especially since New York is one of those cities that prides itself on having a water purification infrastructure so advanced that you can drink right out of the tap.

My roommates weren’t around. My landlord had no idea what was up. And an hour later, the water wasn’t back to normal. So in an attempt to find an answer to my most important question (”When can I take a shower?”), I turned to the Web.

All things “hyperlocal” were irritating the heck out of me. I found nothing on Outside.in or its neighborhood aggregator ilk, or on city blogs like Gothamist. Consequently, I posted a Twitter message saying I thought there was rust in my tap water.

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It would appear that Wal-Mart’s lawyers need to come up with excuses to keep billing Wal-Mart every year around this time. Despite the fact that Wal-Mart employees admit that sites posting “Black Friday Ads” help drive more business, Wal-Mart’s hired guns keep threatening sites for posting the ads, falsely claiming a copyright on the content (hint: you can’t copyright prices). This year, they’ve stepped it up a notch and are claiming that it’s illegal to even link to a site that has such content.

Specifically, Wal-Mart’s high-priced law firm has sent a take-down notice to the site SearchAllDeals.com, which is a search engine/aggregator of various deals sites.

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Early every morning, I open my Web browser and load up a half-dozen “aggregator” sites: Techmeme, Memeorandum, Real Clear Politics, Google News, the Drudge Report, and the Huffington Post. This is my first sortie into the day’s news, the way I orient myself to what’s going on in the world now that I no longer subscribe to a print newspaper. After picking clean the smorgasbord of links, I dip into a second set of sites, these pulling in quirkier tales from around the Web: Digg, BuzzFeed, Fark, Hacker News, Boing Boing, and Kottke as well as my personalized Web aggregators at Friendfeed and Google Reader. During the course of the day, I repeat this process often; in my manic hunt for the freshest stuff on the Web, I reload some of these sites 10 or 20 times each.

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Over the last six months, it seems like every Web site is adopting the notion of a “newsfeed.” These feeds keep me informed about the status/actions of all my friends and relationships. I have a Facebook newsfeed. I have a Twitter feed. I have a LinkedIn feed. And even more recently, a new category of products called feed aggregators have arrived. These aggregators, such as FriendFeed and SocialThing, allow you to track your feeds across multiple sites. There has even been a spoof site that aggregates the aggregators.

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