Aaaliens (a pun on alien and lien – “link” in French) is a new human aggregator coming from the twisted minds of a few French bloggers. They aim at laying the first stones of real link journalism.

They came to realize that, when looking for information

• Algorithmic search could be gamed to easily. On some topics, Google can only provide a Wikipedia page. The rest is only adwords-supported noise.
• Human aggregation lacks authoritativeness. When searching on Delicious or Digg, search results improve dramatically in depth and relevance. But 2 problems arise: the mass of users may not be as qualified as you want them to be (i.e. an IT nerd probably has different criteria for bookmarkablility, compared to, say, a lawyer). Moreover, the digg-syndrome shows that a small group of core users can control the recommendation system.
• Human aggregators lack transparence. Several projects made it their motto to guide users in the online jungle. Publish2 in English and Smallbrother or Vendredi in French provide a selection of links as well. But the result comes from a select club (Publish2) or from a team of editors acting as a black box. They decide what’s fit to link, just like a traditional newsroom decides what’s fit to print.

Aaaliens wants to be all-transparent, so that users know precisely how the machine works. At the same time, there’s no threat of gaming the results, for the founders elaborated stringent rules, which include the possibility to expel someone from the team.

The main source of advantage for aaaliens comes from the quality of the linkers. They’re all bloggers, so they know how the web works and how to interact with an online audience.

For the moment, aaaliens looks a lot like your Delicious network. But the engine running the site allows for more flexibility than Delicious. Time-delineated searches and user ratings, for instance, are unique to aaaliens.

This post is a loose translation/synthesis from Nicolas Voisin and Narvic.