I’m not a fan of aggregators, I prefer to maintain my own list of my favorite sites and visit them individually to get the information I need. If I only pulled RSS feeds from each of these sites I’d only get a small window into what is actually ‘happening’ at the site and I instead prefer to visit directly and gather my news and entertainment first hand. This allows me to see site changes, read full articles and longer excerpts and also allows me to easily visit sites with and without RSS feeds.

Popurls.com however is a pretty neat site, with lots of tools and a preset aggregation scheme pulling feeds from the top web 2.0 properties from around the web. Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit, flickr, Newsvine, Metafilter and Tailrank are all represented there as well as several others. There are viewing options and the overall design is very pleasing to the eye.

Here’s the ‘about us’ blurb from the site describing it’s intention and beginnings…

With the intention to get a quick glance on what’s happening on the web while keeping the common newsreader clean from short-term headlines, popurls was launched in march 2006 by Thomas Marban who is often mentioned for creating the original trend of “single page aggregators”. Rather than a tool, popurls is considered as a gate to an editorial selection of the most popular sites on the internet, presented in a usable way. After features on thousands of blogs and newspapers like the NY times, Yahoo! named it best of the web to finally enter the 30 most popular sites of all time on del.icio.us. Today, popurls is frequented more than 40.000 times each day.