February 15th, 2013

Congrats Ingrid, On Your One-Year Anniversary At Techmeme

T-M-INGRID

Ingrid Lunden began working for Techmeme in February of 2012, after an extensive career at paidContent.org and regular freelance work for publications such as the Financial Times. Today, she celebrates her one-year anniversary with Techmeme.

Ingrid is passionate about all new technology, but has specific interest in mobile, digital media, advertising. Her dedication to the intersection of… → Read More

July 4th, 2012

Three Startups Defending Democracy In America: Votizen, Memeorandum, and NationBuilder

Digital Democracy

The USA was founded by entrepreneurs who said “England has become bloated with bureaucracy. Let’s disrupt it by starting our own agile, more innovative nation.” But on the country’s 236th birthday, we find some democracy’s machinery needs a tune up. Political news, campaigns, and voting itself require an update for the 21st century.

Considering our roots, its only fitting that entrepreneurs would… → Read More

May 25th, 2012

Techmeme’s Gabe Rivera Opens Up About New Vs. Old Media

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… → Read More

January 2nd, 2012

Techmeme Pulls Out The Measuring Tape For Its Top Stories Of 2011

measuingtape

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… → Read More

November 21st, 2011

House of Cards

houseofcards

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… → Read More

October 31st, 2011

Techmeme Opens The Kimono On How It Chooses Headlines And Sources

tech

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… → Read More

July 13th, 2011

Our Bane: The Rewriters

May 16th, 2011

Eventually, One Of These Updates Will Make Google News Not Suck At Tech News, Right?

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… → Read More

April 28th, 2011

Techmeme Becomes Jobmeme Too

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… → Read More

January 20th, 2011

Techmeme Taps Twitter For Faster Headlines, Pithy Context

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… → Read More

March 8th, 2010

Mediagazer: Techmeme's Editors Will Help Us Watch The Death Of Print; Find What's Next

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… → Read More

March 5th, 2010

ReBuzzThis Wants To Be The TweetMeme Of Google Buzz

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… → Read More

December 1st, 2009

Topicfire Sets Hot Coffee News Ablaze In Realtime (And Other Topics Too)

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… → Read More

November 21st, 2009

Screening The News

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→ Read More

November 19th, 2009

With New Staff In Place, Techmeme Polishes Its Mobile Experience

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… → Read More

November 18th, 2009

Engadget Teases. Techmeme Responds. TechCrunch Ridicules.

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

November 18th, 2009

Techmeme Doubles Down On Its Staff

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. → Read More

August 16th, 2009

The Media Bundle Is Dead, Long Live The News Aggregators

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… → Read More

July 27th, 2009

Defending Its Turf, TweetMeme Is Already Threatening To Sue ReTweet

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… → Read More

July 26th, 2009

Retweet.com Looks To Be A TweetMeme Competitor With A Killer Domain Name

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… → Read More

July 22nd, 2009

Tech Investor News Delivers Exactly What You Assume It Would

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… → Read More

July 6th, 2009

Techfuga Is Taking A Couple Of Months Off Delivering Breaking Tech News

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… → Read More

June 30th, 2009

SkyGrid Links Its Financial Firehose To Twitter

SkyGrid, the nifty, free financial news aggregator, is now publishing a stream of news on Twitter, letting users follow breaking business news headlines via the microblogging network.

The news aggregator, which only features media on publicly traded companies, not only has an comprehensive Twitter feed for news stories, but the site also has Twitter feeds that are broken down by sector. So users… → Read More

June 24th, 2009

Fever, A Self-Hosted Feed Reader, Heats Up Your RSS Subscriptions

Fever is a hot new RSS reader that aims to cure “second inbox syndrome, unread item guilt, and unbold elbow.” In other words, the common plights of the modern RSS power user.

Besides offering a full-featured feed reader, the application attempts to create a personalized Techmeme by scanning a user’s feed list for popular (or hot) links. Fever then groups these links into stories and assigns each… → Read More

May 5th, 2009

Tweetmeme Is Getting Freakin' Awesome

Tweetmeme is on a tear. According to Compete, the Twitter-centric link tracker went from nowhere in February, 2009 (with 26,000 unique visitors) to more than tenfold increase in March (to 385,000 uniques). Nick Halstead, The CEO of UK-based Fav.or.it, the company behind Tweetmeme, tells me he is tracking closer to 200,000 uniques a month based on yesterday’s visitors, but that he is adding 50… → Read More

May 5th, 2009

Niche Mag Publisher Future Launches Dozens Of News Aggregator Sites Under DailyRadar

The future of media is algorithmic aggregation, at least that is the approach Future US is taking. The U.S. subsidiary of Future PLC, and publisher of such niche magazines as Nintendo Power, Guitar World, and Maximum PC, is adopting a different approach online than simply putting its print articles on the Web. Instead, it has launched dozens of news aggregation and discovery sites called “Blips”… → Read More

January 28th, 2009

Uh Oh. Now You Can Suggest Stories To Techmeme Via Twitter

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… → Read More

January 4th, 2009

2009: Products I Can't Live Without

At the beginning of each year I traditionally publish a list of my favorite startups and products. This is the fourth year I’ve done this – previous lists: 2006, 2007, 2008. You guys get to pick the winners of the Crunchies – this list is all mine.

This is a list of the products I tend to use daily. Some are for work (Wordpress, Delicious, Zoho, etc.), some are for fun (MySpace Music, Hulu, etc)… → Read More

December 3rd, 2008

TechMeme Gives Up On Fully Automated News

3+ year old TechMeme, an automated news site that shows breaking news clustered by topic, has always generated “headlines” by analyzing how news sites link to each other. If a lot of sites start linking to something unique, TechMeme guesses it’s news.

That isn’t working, says founder Gabe Rivera today in a blog post: “Only an algorithm would feature news about Anna Nicole Smith’s hospitalization→ Read More

September 5th, 2008

Veritocracy = Digg + Techmeme (500 Invites)

As a concept, Veritocracy is actually quite simple. At its heart, Veritocracy pulls together some of the better qualities of Techmeme — targeted stories and related posts to an original story — and Digg. Once you get to the front page, you’re immediately presented with a nice layout of highly-targeted stories on topics ranging from politics and technology to business and entertainment.

The… → Read More