Hey, who said blogging wasn’t cool — after all, how often do you get to use cool terms like “aggregator” and “splog?” Those terms have come up recently because Om Malik and a couple of other A-list bloggers have raised the issue of whether a new site called Top 10 Sources is doing something unsavoury or not. The site essentially pulls together the RSS feeds from the 10 blogs it feels are leaders in a particular field.

Om and Mike Rundle of BusinessLogs (a 9rules blog) aren’t saying Top 10 Sources is a “splog” or that the site is plagiarizing their content. But they have raised the question of whether aggregating their feeds — without asking first — is stepping over the bounds of civilized behaviour, particularly when some of the pages include the full post, not just an excerpt. Adam Green of Darwinianweb has also written about this thorny issue.

But what makes this even more interesting is that it turns out that Top 10 Sources is backed, in part, by John Palfrey — who happens to not only be a law professor, but the executive director of the prestigious Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, where Dave Winer (one of the inventors of RSS) is a fellow. In other words, not your run-of-the-mill aggregator, let alone a splogger.

Professor Palfrey, as it turns out (thanks to Adam Green for the links) has not only thought long and hard about this issue, he wrote about it on his blog as far back as 2003, when he wondered whether the increasing interest in RSS feeds would lead to just this kind of debate. As he notes, the attempt to exercise too much control over one’s feed can become — if taken to the extreme — the same kind of desire for control that the record industry has tried to exert by suing downloaders. However, he does admit that maybe full feeds isn’t the right way to go.

An interesting debate, that’s for sure. For the record, I think Top 10 Sources is doing something that makes sense, it isn’t selling ads all around everyone’s content, and therefore I would put it in pretty much the same camp as Google News. Let a thousand aggregators bloom.