I’m still scratching my head at Mark Cuban’s comments about news aggregators being freeloading vampires that should be blocked by news sites.
As Danny Sullivan points out, Cuban is an investor in Mahalo, which is an aggregator extraordinaire.
And in 2008 at the TechCrunch50 conference, Cuban said he’d like to be an investor in news aggregator TechMeme. He says: “Gabe from TechMeme, I’ve been running after him for two years to try to let me do something with him because I think its a brilliant idea and I think I can add value…I try to stick to things that are strategic to me that I think are fun that I think are game changing.”
Cuban was mostly railing on Google News in his talk, but TechMeme has a similar model of linking to stories with a short excerpt. You can watch the entire interview here.
I’ve emailed Mark to get see if he wants to talk more about this, because I continue to be more than confused.
Mark Cuban is a tech entrepreneur who owns the Dallas Mavericks. He is the founder of Broadcast.com (acquired by Yahoo! in 1999 for $5.04 billion), HDNet, and several other companies. He has also been an angel investor for several startups including SlideShare, Goowy, RedSwoosh, Box.net, Weblogs, Inc., and Mahalo.
Techmeme, “the favorite news website of technology industry insiders” (Bloomberg) and “one of the first Web sites loaded on Silicon Valley’s laptops and iPhones each morning” (NYT), is the tech industry’s leading news aggregator. Introduced in 2005, the company added Mediagazer in 2010 to track media news. Other verticals include memeorandum (politics) and WeSmirch (celebrity news). Operating originally as Google News-style fully-automated news aggregators, the company blended in human editors to the curation process at Techmeme and Mediagazer beginning in...
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