There’s a “new way to get on Techmeme“. It’s called Twitter, have you heard of it?
All you need to do is send a message on the micro-sharing service that begins with “Tip @Techmeme” or “Tip @TechmemeFH”. The website, which aggregates news stories from across the web and determines which ones are worth featuring on the site and also detects links and relations between stories, will consider the article to be posted for many tech fanatics and professionals news reporters to see. And you’ll get credit with your Twitter id too!
This, of course, is a direct result of the recent hire of a human editor at Techmeme, which essentially came down to the popular website giving up on fully automated news.
According to the blog post announcing the new feature, tips will be processed through a combination of automated and manual means, although we’re not really sure what that’s supposed to mean, exactly. The Q&A part of the post only mentions that tips will be “promptly found” thanks to the Twitter Search API.
Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera added that they’ll be able to grab the target URL for the most common URL shortening services, that they’ll be able to fight off spam, and that it’s generally not a very good idea to submit your own stories (except in undefined, rare cases).
The question is: why does Techmeme need this in the first place? It’s not like it’s a news website where content is actually published, and the algorithm that makes certain stories stick out automatically has proved its usefulness in the past, so why depend on user submissions for good stuff?
The service does drop the ball now and again, but crowdsourcing headline gathering is a peculiar move for a website that once prided itself on being entirely automated.
That said: hey Techmeme, here’s a tip for you.
