To any member of the tech media, Techmeme is the first site you visit in the morning, and the last site you check before bed. It’s a thermometer of today’s news, with more context per headline than any single news source can offer. This is the beauty of aggregation, which some more traditional media outlets frown upon.
But founder and CEO Gabe Rivera has been doing this since 2004, and has incredible insight into the differences between old media and the young guns. I grabbed him backstage during Disrupt NYC 2012 after his panel on the tech media to see how he felt about new media’s dependance on sources like The New York Times, the myth of objectivity, the difference between click bait and link bait (if there is one), and his personal source preference when he sits down with a cup of coffee to read the day’s news. → Read More
Tis the season for annual recaps and retrospectives. And while most such lists stem from a blogger’s yearning for page views during the otherwise-quiet holiday season, some lists are actually interesting — even useful.
One such list comes from Techmeme, one of the best tech news aggregators on the web, which releases an annual overview of the year’s top stories. The site typically generates the list using a variety of secret-sauce algorithms, but this year they’ve done something a bit more straightforward: they measured how tall each story was on the site. The bigger the story, the more important it probably was. You can find the full list right here. → Read More
It’s possible new media will steal a page from the VCs and the economics of the Cloud, putting these streaming deals together on multiple networks (Facebook, YouTube, Ustream, iCloud) with talent owning the rights in return for low startup costs. Spotify could fight off the independents by offering contracts directly to the artists, and team with the streaming studios to live cast sessions and concerts over the federated network. Soundtrack compilations for stream network-owned series like House of Cards may be where music and gaming crossover first occurs.
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For many, the methodology behind how technology news aggregator Techmeme chooses sources to link to for headlines has been an enigma. But today, founder Gabe Rivera has opened the kimono a little bit on how stories are chosen to be featured on the site. So bloggers and tech journalists take note.
For background, Techmeme uses a set of algorithms as well as human editors to choose and curate stories to highlight. As Rivera writes, Techmeme’s mission is “to highlight the essential tech news and commentary of the moment on a single page. The must-reads for anyone who needs to know where the industry is going, whether they’re an investor, engineer, entrepreneur, executive, or enthusiast.” That doesn’t include biotech, cleantech or content that hardcore gamers might enjoy. Techmeme works to be comprehensive, fast, relevant, scannable, and story-rich. → Read More
For as long as I can remember, there has been one constant in tech news: Google News sucks at it.
Now, that’s not entirely fair since Google News doesn’t actually provide any of their own content. Instead, they use the supposedly magical Google algorithms to curate others’ content from around the web. Still, there’s just no way around it — the product, at least for tech news, sucks.
Again, this is nothing new. I’ve been writing this article at least once a year for five years or so. But what’s amazing to me is how many updates Google does to the product and it still sucks. Even more remarkable is that a lot of people continue to go to it as a source of tech news. How do I know? When TechCrunch does appear on it, it sends a lot of traffic. → Read More
How do you know times are booming in the tech sector? Techmeme just became a job board.
To be clear, it will continue to be the go-to source for technology news as it has been for the past several years — but there’s now a new area in the right-hand column devoted to “Who’s hiring in tech”.
Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera writes about the new addition here, noting that “billboards suck” and taking a shot at our parent company, AOL, which has become addicted to putting up billboard touting jobs all over the Bay Area. Obviously, Rivera hopes this will become a new chunk of revenue for his site. → Read More
It’s been no secret that for a number of years now, quite a few posts you see on this site and others come directly as a result of a tweet from someone. It usually works like this: someone tweets out a bit of information either to quickly promote it — or even better, that they probably shouldn’t — and we jump all over it, adding context. But as fast as we are at that, it can still take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours to get those posts up. And in some cases, that’s just not good enough for an aggregator like Techmeme. They want it now.
And now they’ll be able to get it now. Today, the service is launching the ability to turn tweets into Techmeme headlines. Yep, they’ll no longer have to wait for the first tech blog to jump on the news. They’ll just put up the tweet itself. That is, if it’s worthy. → Read More
To many in the industry, Techmeme is hands down the best aggregator of technology news. So it makes sense that they’d try to take their combination of algorithms and editors to other verticals. But they’ve tried in the past, and it hasn’t worked. But that doesn’t mean they’re giving up.
Today, the people behind Techmeme are rolling out Mediagazer, a new site focused on aggregating and serving up all the best media news from around the web. The timing seems perfect given the level of interest surrounding the slow but interesting death of print media. And the interest around exciting new devices like the iPad, which may or may not reinvigorate the industry. → Read More
You know how TweetMeme started out trying to be the Techmeme of Twitter before it ventured off plastering its ReTweet buttons on every blog on the Web? Well now there’s a site that just launched today that wants to be the TweetMeme of Google Buzz called ReBuzzThis.
It is not much to look at right now—five lame links as of this writing. But the site wants to encourage blogs and other sites to add its ReBuzz buttons to posts and articles. The posts that get ReBuzzed the most shoot up the homepage just like on TweetMeme with ReTweets. Except that TweetMeme tries to count all retweets, not just those done through its buttons. ReBuzzThis seems to only count Rebuzzes done through its site and buttons, so it is not really capturing the most Buzzed about articles and posts. → Read More
If you’re interested in finding hot news on the web it’s not too hard — provided the topic is technology. Twitter, Tweetmeme, Techmeme, Digg, and the like all offer up a mixture of what’s hot in technology with varying degrees of success. But for other topics, it’s not so easy. That’s why Topicfire was built.
Topicfire is what co-founder Ryan Sit calls a “realtime hot news aggregator.” It uses what the service dubs its “HeatRank” to rate any particular story on a 1 to 10 scale, with 10 representing the hottest stories. These stories are broken up into dozens of categories so users can drill down to find just what they want, and easily sort the stream to find just the hottest stories. → Read More
Editor’s note: Today, being a news junkie requires not just the ability to keep up with hundreds of breaking stories a day, but the ability to redistribute those stories to your followers and news sites. To get some insight into the modern news junkie, we asked Mrinal Desai to share with us how he screens the news in the guest post below. Desai is the co-founder of CrossLoop, but some of you may recognize him more from Twitter or Techmeme, where he tips stories every day—580 of those tips have appeared as headlines since the beginning of this year. You can read his last guest post here.
Like many out there, I have been, am and always will be a news addict. For many news junkies, it is the fleeting, current fix of information about a breaking topic that interests them, only to be replaced by the next headline. They jump from headline to headline, forgetting the one they just read as they move on to the next one.
For me personally, news is not only timely information on the current state of affairs but also a way to take a deep dive, to connect analysis and information together and learn through application. I am looking for insight. It could be patterns, it could be knowledge about an industry or it could be an opportunity to become introspective and ask questions.
Keeping this in mind, here is a snapshot of my consumption and distribution of news both offline and online. I’ll divide the way I screen the news by the screens on which it comes to me. → Read More
If you’re addicted to Techmeme, like we are, you’re probably addicted to reading it on your mobile phone too. The problem is that the experience hasn’t been great. There was a mobile version of the site, called Mini-Techmeme, but no one seemed to know about it. More importantly, it didn’t give the full Techmeme experience because it didn’t include discussion items. Today, Techmeme has launched a new version of its site optimized for smart phones.
If you visit the regular Techmeme site now on devices like an iPhone, a Palm Pre, or the new Verizon Droid, you’ll see a site optimized for touchscreen phones. The site include three main tabs, “Top, ” More,” and “New.” These represent the three key areas of Techmeme’s main site. This tabbed navigation allows you to easily jump through the sections. Each section contains the main headlines and a right pointing arrow which you click on to see the discussion items. → Read More
This message currently graces every page on Engadget. Not sure what they’re up to, but it’s promised to be “awesome awesome stuff,” editor-in-chief Joshua Topolsky tweets.
In fact, beyond the in your face teaser promising that, “What’s next is coming now. Stay close.”, Topolsky has been tweeting teasers all night. So Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera decided to respond (below): → Read More
About a year ago, tech news aggregator Techmeme hired Megan McCarthy as its first dedicated human editor. Founder Gabe Rivera clearly liked the idea; he’s now added three more, doubling the size of the staff.
Rich DeMuro (formerly of CNET), Lidija Davis (formerly of ReadWriteWeb) and Mahendra Palsule (a former IT project manager) all join McCarthy to make up the editorial staff for Techmeme. Rivera notes that this team means they basically have human eyes watching for the best tech news 24 hours a day now. This allows Rivera and his fellow programmer, Omer Horvitz to keep the backend and the algorithm rolling. → Read More
Here we go again. The newspaper industry is blaming online news aggregators for its dwindling profits and inability to adapt to a world of links and truly-free flowing information. (They like it when information flows freely into their pages, but not so much when it flows out).
On Thursday, paidContent ran an essay by media consultant Arnon Mishkin called “The Fallacy Of The Link Economy” which was misguided on so many levels.
The newspaper industry wants to go back to the world before the Web, when each newspaper was a small media bundle packed with stories, 80 percent of which sucked. But it didn’t matter because you’d gladly pay a dollar to read the one or two stories that caught your eye on the front page, hoping there would be more inside. Well, guess what? The media bundle is dead. News sites can no longer capture reader’s attention with 20 percent news, and 80 percent suck → Read More
It hasn’t even been 24 hours since we wrote about the impending launch of TweetMeme competitor ReTweet, and already TweetMeme founder Nick Halstead is threatening ReTweet with a lawsuit. He takes being king of retweets very seriously.
It is not so much the apparent flat-out copying of TweetMeme’s Website design (ReTweet has not even launched in private beta yet), that bothers him. After all, TweetMeme itself was highly “inspired” by another news aggregator, Techmeme. What bugs him is what he claims to be almost exact copying of code. Halstead writes on the TweetMeme blog: → Read More
Those little green reweet buttons you see across the web on sites like this one have helped TweetMeme rise in popularity. The buttons are now so ubiquitous that the service has seemingly become the de-facto retweeting mechanism for content on the web. But it looks like it’s about to get a challenger, with a killer name, Retweet.com.
Retweet.com currently only has a a landing page saying that it’s “coming soon,” so it’s hard to know exactly what it is from that. But there are plenty of clues around the web pointing to it being a TweetMeme competitor. The main hint comes from a design contest taking place at 99designs. The prize is over $1,000 to design the site, and all of the mockups look very similar to TweetMeme (which, to be fair, takes a lot of its look from sites like Digg). → Read More
As a writer covering the tech industry, there are a couple of websites and services that I would classify as downright essential for my job, including some VoIP/IM communication tools and my e-mail application of choice (Gmail).
Apart from those, I consider an RSS reader to be such a vital tool for me as well, both on a private as a professional level. Add to that Techmeme, which has an algorithm in place designed to weed out the best and/or most talked about news stories related to the tech industry out there, and you can tell I have a pretty solid set of tools readily available that enable me to keep tabs on what I want and need to be tracking closely.
New to the arsenal of tools at my disposal free of charge is Tech Investor News, which despite its not-so-sexy name is exactly what it sounds like: a news site that investors in tech companies – plus industry pundits and reporters – should be made aware of. → Read More
There are a couple of places where you can go to get your fill of tech-related information and keep track of breaking news and events outside of your RSS reader or e-mail inbox. Google News isn’t one of those places (yet), but Techmeme and to a lesser degree Alltop, popurls and Digg are some of the most frequented websites when it comes to pleasing those who like to stay on top of hot tech news (us included).
Techmeme is undeniably the leader of the pack; it has solid algorithms and ranking systems in place that can quickly detect breaking news and gives you a clean overview of which other technology news sites and blogs are discussing it practically with minimal lag. It has its flaws, sure, but I dare you to show me a service that does what Techmeme is supposed to do better than they are. → Read More
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