Techniques for electronic aggregation of information

An article comprising a storage medium containing instructions that when executed enable a system to:

• generate a montage comprising a presentation surface with multiple presentation tiles each having a tile object for a corresponding content file, each tile object generated by selectively extracting a portion of content from the corresponding content file based on a type definition comprising a set of rules concerning which information to extract from the corresponding content file based upon space within a defined region of the presentation tile and by formatting the extracted content portion within the defined region of a presentation tile, the montage arranged for use with a gesture interface;
• send the montage and content files to a network service;
• receive references to the montage and each content file;
• and
• associate a reference for a content file with a corresponding tile object.