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.

For those that don’t frequent the site, Techmeme arranges stories in clusters — you’ll typically see the most important story (oftentimes the post that broke the news) at the top, with more headlines nested beneath it with additional details and analysis. Many stories don’t get a subheadline at all, but the big ones often have two, three — or, in the case of the absolute biggest stories of the year, over a dozen. Which leads to a larger screen footprint, hence Techmeme’s more literal interpretation when it  analyzes its ‘biggest stories’.

Apple has the most appearances on the list, taking up seven of the top twenty five slots. Unfortunately, half of these were related to Steve Jobs’ decreasing role at Apple and ultimately the sad news of his death on October 5, at the age of 56 — which is rightfully marked as the most significant story of the year. Apple’s other appearances on the list include the launch of the iPhone 4S, iOS5, and iCloud, the iPad 2, and the launch of Subscriptions in the App Store.

The rest of the list is largely rounded out by news from other tech giants, including Facebook’s launch of Timeline,  Twitter’s New New Twitter, Microsoft’s partnership with Nokia, and the failed AT&T/T-Mobile merger.

In fact, only one startup appears on the list: Color, the much-maligned company that raised $41 million only to have its initial product bomb (it relaunched with a new version last month). Another outlier was Egypt’s decision to shut down the Internet last January, which is number 22 on the list.

You may also be interested in TechCrunch’s own 2011 recap, which unsurprisingly features many of the same stories.

Image by Redjar

A funny thing happened on Techmeme yesterday. Though it may seem a subtle or even nonexistent shift, the stories I found most interesting took a turn away from the tech and toward the media. Gone were anything but the last vestiges of the Steve Jobs changed/tweaked the world argument, and along with it the Google + tracking poll. Instead, the media services are on the rise or fall, most notably Spotify, Netflix, Starz, and in general the unravelling/lash back of big cable/carrier cartel.

The Starz news is most fascinating, with the movie aggregator moving from supporting Netflix to what may be a direct competitive strategy. By pulling back from a deal with Netflix, the company triggered the rationale for Netflix to compete more directly with HBO and Showtime by investing in series development. That in turn pushed Netflix toward focusing on the streaming side of its business and fire its DVD customers.

Similarly, Spotify is beginning to get pushback from what’s left of the CD record business. Small record labels are apparently pulling their artists out on the theory that they’re leaving money on the table from record sales going to all you can stream subscribers. In both cases, the market has reacted by punishing the logic of these transformation drivers. The easy money is on the status quo reaping its payback as we reconfigure back to the Bad Old Days where nothing is available and we’re being “protected” from intellectual property theft.

Actually this is not what is happening. Instead, we’ve gotten a taste of how it might work and there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. If we focus less on each individual player, and more on the Interplay between them, a different picture emerges. Starz is a case in point. Buried in its strategy of maintaining relationships with Comcast similar to the one abandoned with Netflix is the audacious plan to start offering some of its studio offerings a la carte in tablet form. Why would Comcast let the little player slice and dice its bundling strategy with network and early window film releases?

Because Starz is also going into competition with Netflix by partnering with the streaming service’s competitors, especially Amazon and their incredible Fire hardware. By establishing themselves as a hybrid between streaming and cable aggregation, they have potentially just enough juice together with the second-line streamers to entice the studios to give them access to iPad and Fire rights in return for cutting Netflix down to size. Once that happens, Netflix could extract the same rights to keep the new competitors at bay. Or even more disruptive, join the coalition.

On the Spotify side of the business, the threat of flight from the service is counter-balanced by the ability to buy most music to fill in the gaps from Apple and Amazon or even on CD from Amazon or Walmart. Already we’re getting used to the idea that we get streaming from Column A and Beatles from Column B and special promotions from all of the competitors that fall on either side. One of the players is offering exclusive Rolling Stones live recordings unavailable elsewhere, for example. The genie is out of the bottle and the record cartel is getting a taste of how digital can work for them.

Another fascinating development from either the Times or the Journal — I can’t remember either when or which publication because the iPad has shifted my consumption to store and catch up mode. Shows with large social tweet numbers don’t translate to the shows that prove popular with mainstream audiences. Attempts to differentiate through the use of social signals may be lost in the widespread use of social this year.

What happens when push notification becomes a trusted alert platform and Starz-like services give us the ability to mine social networks and directly link tweets or reviews to auto-downloading those programs to our tablets. Each small chink in the big network model translates to more and more user control by turning preferences into transactions, all completely outside the ratings game. Just as my Times/Journal consumption is moving to on-demand, so is the rest of the media.

My choices begin to be managed by the immediacy with which I want the programming. Like a late-booked flight, I’ll pay more for how it fits into my ability to predict and consume the service. At some point, the economics shift from supporting the incumbents to supporting the new incumbents. The more I’m able to assemble a socially-aware version of Comcast that leverages the cloud of influentials I track, the less I pay in to the aggregated mainstream services that are relatively opaque to useful social signals.

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.

And just if by magical thinking, Techmeme tells me Netflix is bringing back Arrested Development, the popular comedy produced and voiced-over by Ron Howard and cancelled by Fox in 2004. What’s even more interesting is that the resurrection is exclusive to Netflix, a streaming version of what HBO pioneered with Sopranos et al. Premium original content bundled on what may well be the first example of streaming achieving a credible cable cutter foothold. With Twitter pushing breaking news and the studios beginning to go direct to Netflix and Amazon, can a return to the West Wing be far behind?

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, scannable, relevant, and story-rich.

Some of the sure-fire ways to get a Techmeme headline include an exclusive story with a ‘detail-rich headline. If it’s a non exclusive story, then Techmeme will highlight the story that offers the best analysis, context, summarization and headline. Being first is also a consideration, but it’s not the key differentiator. And of course, interesting stories will hit as well.

In the ‘do’s’ to getting a Techmeme headline, Rivera outlines some of the best practices to appearing on Techmeme, including breaking a major story, writing a clear headline, linking to other stories (including Techmeme), writing a killer analysis piece, or summarizing a major story that’s behind a paywall. Other helpful hints—don’t bury the lede, include images, videos, or figures, and take advantage of the slow news cycle over the weekend.

The don’ts: Omitting key details in a headline; putting stories behind paywalls, leaving out links to other sources, not updating a developing story, posting old news, and including factual errors, spelling or grammar mistakes in stories.

This is probably the most candid revelation of how Techmeme works to date. We always knew that it combined a mixture of human curation and algorithms, but it is certainly helpful to see a list of do’s and dont’s for sources. And these guidelines can surely be useful for bloggers and writers across the board, even outside of Techmeme-world.

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.

So is this just me complaining that we don’t appear on it enough? Well sure, partially. But to me, our sporadic appearances are also indicative of the big problem the service has.

How much tech news gets broken on TechCrunch? Even our rivals would admit “a lot”. Yet if that news appears on Google News at all (far from a given), it often does hours later and almost always under another source that has re-reported it after we have. That’s really Google News’ problem in a nutshell. It’s hit-or-miss, way too slow, and as a result, often credits the re-bloggers rather than actual sources.

Let’s look at the Google News Technology section right now (which, humorously, is still called the “Sci/Tech” section — Technology apparently isn’t yet big enough to have its own stand-alone section even though I think just about everyone in the media industry would disagree at this point — and impressively odd since Google is a company known for one thing: technology).

• Top story: Sony’s freebies after Playstation hack. First of all, a fairly “meh” top story. (Main story is very old, new update today is fairly lame freebies in response.) Second and more importantly, even this new twist to the story is hours old. They use this Computerworld story as the main headline, which is little more than a repurposing of information from Sony’s own blog from hours earlier.
• Second story: RIM stock falls on Playbook recall news. Again, old news — from yesterday, in fact. And they link to this Reuters story which appears to have been written on a typewriter in the 1940s — and does nothing to expand upon the story which is over a day old. The secondary headline they choose is from a site called “Today’s THV” which is some local bullshit site that just republishes AP stories. Puke.
• Third story: “Next hurdle for Giffords: Mending damaged skull.” Interesting and important story, no doubt. But a top tech headline? The algorithm is fooled because her husband is an astronaut aboard Space Shuttle Endavor, which took off on its last flight earlier today. Again, that would also clearly be a “Sci” story, which should have its own category.

This goes on and on.

Now, let’s compare it to Techmeme.

• Top story: Rumors of Apple secret launch for 10th anniversary of Apple Stores. Hot story? Yep. Bullshit? Maybe, but judging from the smoke surrounding this, probably not. Regardless, it’s something everyone wants to know about. And yet, it’s story number nine on Google News, waaaaay below the fold. And they cite PC Magazine which is re-blogging the actual source, BGR. Guess who Techmeme cites? Yep.
• Second story: Bing/Facebook integration. Again, good story, though several hours old — BUT, Techmeme cites the Bing blog as the big source of the news. In other words, they give proper credit rather than award johnny-come-lately, which is exactly who Google News gives credit to in their listing for it (more on this in a minute).
• Third story: Amazon rumored dual-core and quad-core tablets. Again, really hot story. And at least at a high level, seemingly for sure not bullshit. Google News doesn’t have this story at all. Not one word, even though a dozen or so big sites are covering it.

Techmeme learned long ago that algorithms alone aren’t nearly enough to fully, quickly, and competently convey the news. Google has not yet learned this. For some categories, their algorithms probably work fine. For tech news, they suck.

And I’d argue they suck for both visitors and for publishers. Because it’s so obvious what Google’s algorithms are looking for, there’s a not-so-secret trick on how to game them. Instead of rushing to get a post out about a hot story, just wait a few hours. By then, the story will bubble towards the top of Google News’ tech section and if you time it correctly and you’re a site that Google News watches (some good, some bad), you can easily be the top headline for the entire section (which also means placement on the main site as well).

This works because Google News favors recent “takes” on a story instead of actual sources of information. You could argue that’s okay in some situations, but often these “takes” are just like the Today’s THV bullshit: republishing AP content late.

In other words, if you’re in the business of breaking news, you’ll almost never find your stories on Google News. Instead, you’ll find someone else re-purposing your story there hours later and reaping tens of thousands of pageviews as a result of the sloth and/or jackassery.

Why bring this all up now? Because Google announced yet more updates to Google News today. I tried reading over what’s new, but my eyes quickly glazed over. I’m certain it will be business as usual.

Actually, it might be worse.

As Danny Sullivan points out, Google now allows you to cut out the source of much of the fresh content — blogs — as an option. Brilliant. Now you can further hide the sources that Google was already burying for you.

At some point, I have to believe Google will start to care about the quality of this product. But years of experience tells me otherwise. And really, that’s fine by me. It’s just another service I can easily ignore.

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.

“I think ‘we’re hiring’ is one of the key messages companies want to get out to the industry,” Rivera tells us. “You see it in the publicity stunts. In all the weird sponsorships at SXSW. And of course, the billboards,” he continues.

So does this mean Techmeme will now be more conflicted — certainly a hot topic these days — and put up more news stories about the companies that buy these job spots? “Not more than any other news site that accepts advertising from an array of companies. The only time I mentioned consideration of sponsors to my editorial staff was when I asked them specifically not to give sponsors extra consideration,” Rivera says. Besides, Techmeme already accepted more straight-up advertising anyway.

The companies up there right now did each write their own taglines too! So far, the best:

• Twitter: Less characters; more fulfilling. (Cute.)
• Microsoft: Come as you are. Do what you love. (Is that a Nirvana reference?)
• Square: Come simplify the complex. (True and much needed.)
• StumbleUpon: Invent the future of web discovery. (Bold.)
• Twilio: Come run wild in our geek pasture! (Tempting.)
• Airbnb: Build a galactic marketplace. (Insane?)

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.

So are we, the tech reporters who scan Twitter for news, now out of a job? We spoke with Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera about the new feature. He’s quick to point out that Techmeme still loves context and good angles — because the audience that reads Techmeme still loves context and good angles. Further, he notes that there will only be a few scenarios under which a tweet would hit Techmeme.

First of all, some straight-up product announcements sent via Twitter first have a good shot of making it if Techmeme can find it fast enough. Rivera says that companies who wish to utilizes this should add a “@Techmeme” or “@TechmemeFH” to their tweet (or simply link to Techmeme) so that they’ll be able to find it more quickly. Secondly, some rumors sent via Twitter that are generating a lot of buzz have a shot as well. And then there are the interesting tweets sent out that perhaps shouldn’t be sent. Rivera cites the post we did on then-Twitter developer Alex Payne tweeting about new Twitter.com features overshadowing third-party clients as one example of this.

Tweets will also be able to hit Techmeme in the discussion section (the smaller area of links below the main headlines). Here, Rivera expects more commentary about news items to appear. So if Robert Scoble has something interesting to say about a new Microsoft announcement, it could land here, for example.

This idea to add tweets to Techmeme follows the service’s willingness to look for information in places beyond traditional blogs. For example, they’ve linked to threads on Quora and Google Buzz in the past (something we’ve been doing more and more as well). But Twitter should now be a bigger part of this Techmeme ecosystem (the other sites under the banner like Mediagazer will have this ability as well). And as long as it doesn’t put us out of work, we look forward to it.

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.

But why chose to focus on media?

“Media news has several things going for it: lots of new coverage every day, lots of interlinking, a variety of subtopics (video, blogs, journalism, newspapers, etc.) and (we hope) a potential audience with interest in several of those subtopics,” Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera tells us.

Rivera has tried in the past to roll the Techmeme idea to other verticals such as celebrity news (WeSmirch), political news (Memeorandum), and even baseball news (Ballbug). All those sites still exist, but none have gotten the level of interest that Techmeme has.

So why will this be different? Aside from the interest in media, this is the first site Rivera has rolled out since switching over to using human editor curation. And actually, Mediagazer will be launched under the control of Megan McCarthy, the first human editor Rivera hired in late 2008. Rivera has since made other hires to round out a full staff that can work around the clock for Techmeme.

Says McCarthy, “Media is tumultuous. Some areas are growing, some shrinking, and there’s no clear path of where things are going. There’s talk about the future of journalism, consolidation of media ownership, bloggers, Twitter, etc. It affects daily life (look at how the Oscars were blacked out in New York City and how many people were touched by that). This is an industry that is filled with such disruption — you need to have a way to clearly view the big picture. Mediagazer does that.“

And a bit more about how it actually works from Mediagazer’s about area:

We gather all the important stories about media and present them to you in a timely, thorough, and organized manner. Our story selection method uses the power of our freakishly smart algorithm combined with direct editorial input from knowledgeable human editors.

We collect every relevant take on an issue and package them together in a comprehensive group of links. That way, you not only get the lead opinion on an issue, but you can easily see all the supporting, opposing, smart, controversial, notable, and previously unseen viewpoints. You get the big picture.

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.

But it may be onto something. One of the top feature requests on Google Buzz is a Rebuzz button. So we may see an official version of ReBuzzThis come out on Google Buzz itself.

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.

For example, Sit likes to read about coffee, but there was no good aggregator of that news on the web. With Topicfire, there is. There’s also a page for beer news. And bacon news. And of course, they also offer the bigger topics that are tradtionally aggregated, such as the aforementioned tech news, and celebrity news.

But what’s nice about Topicfire is that it’s very simple. The main page is a single stream of news that is updated in realtime as certain stories from thousands of sources around the web get hot. This hotness is determined not by links (part of what Techmeme uses) or votes (what Digg uses) or retweets (which Tweetmeme uses), but instead mostly by comments on the originating site itself.

Topicfire looks at every site they pull in content from and rates individual posts based on the comments they are getting in a set amount of time versus the average posts on that site. This creates the HeatRank. They are also looking at retweets as a backup, but as they note, those aren’t really a good indicator of popularity beyond tech news. The main page and each topic page has a slider along the top to allow users to easily filter which content they want to see on the 1 to 10 scale.

Perhaps even better is that Topicfire is great at highlighting popular stories by making their images dynamic. That is to say, if a story is really hot, it may have an image in the stream that is the full width of the stream. If it’s less popular, it may just have a thumbnail view. This is something which is an obvious but natural visiual cue to let a reader know that one story is more important that another one.

Another nice element of Topicfire is that it’s entirely built on top of Facebook Connect. This means there is no new service to sign up for, you simply log-in with your Facebook account and you’re done. If you comment on an item or like it, this all gets sent back to your Facebook profile. “We want to be the news for Facebook,” Sit says.

That said, Topicfire also easily allows yout to tweet out any story you find on the site as well with the click of a button.

So why use something like this over an RSS reader? Well that should be obvious. Most people still don’t get that concept, nor do they necessarily want to see every single story from every single source, there’s just not enough time to read that all. Topicfire takes the RSS feed for these thousands of sites and breaks it up into the hottest items. They use both rssCloud and Pubsubhubbub to pull in these feeds in realtime.

Unlike Techmeme, the only human curation done on Topicfire is the picking on sources and topics. Eventually, the team may crowdsource both of those as well. Google News is also all algorithm-based, but it’s often severly lacking when it comes to breaking news — which again, is the main focus of Topicfire.

Topicfire is launching its first iteration today. Down the road, they hope to add elements such as an iPhone app that would allow them to alert users when a new story they are interested in is breaking. They also plan to create a comprehensive search element, and open an API so others can pull in their data.

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.

No Screen:

• I don’t start a day without reading The Wall Street Journal in print
• Currently, I get 4 magazines and I go through them on the weekend: The Economist, The Atlantic, Wired and Fortune. Before they stopped, I used to also get Business 2.0 and MIT’s Technology Review.

Screen 1 – MacBook Pro:

Apps: Twitter, Google Reader, Techmeme and a little bit of Facebook

Twitter: I’ve been a user since January 2007.  Its always on for me. I invest a significant amount of time in figuring out who/what to follow based on my interests.  Today this ‘list’ stands at 489. Building this list is a continuous process and it typically consists of people who can teach or inform me of something, news sources and people I respect and with whom I want to build a long term relationship with independent of business. Of this, I have a column/list/group called “Pigeons” (birdie, early days of communication—you get it, right?).  I read each and every tweet of this group. I have about 75 in this group. 15 of my personal favorites, apart from @techcrunch and all those who write for it @techcrunch/team, are:

@bxchen – Technology Reporter, Wired
@148apps – iPhone App Reviews
@msuster – General Partner, GRP Partners
@jennydeluxe – Technology Reporter, The New York Times
@scobleizer – everything social media
@Learmonth – Reporter at Adage
@jasonhiner – Executive Editor at TechRepublic (CBS Interactive)
@leplaporte – Technology Journalist and Broadcaster
@appadvice – Editor, Webware (CBS Interactive)
@taylorbuley – Technology Reporter, Forbes
@sarahintampa – Writer, ReadWriteWeb
@reckless – Nilay Patel, Engadget
@gizmodo – Everything gadgets blog
@dmac1 – Technology reporter, Business Week
@joshk – General Partner, First Round Capital

You can follow them all in one click on the Twitter List I created called “Fifteen“

Screen 2 – iPhone: I have played with a few iPhone news apps, both paid and free.  These include the mobile apps from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times , Byline, Fluent News, News Fuse, BBCReader, NPR News, ReadItLater, ZenNews, and News Pro. I also visit mobile news sites. Being a little glued to Techmeme, I was very excited to see its new mobile version for smartphones—the icon took a spot right away on my home screen:

After experimenting and trying them all out, though, my current favorite native iPhone app is Newsstand (iTunes Link) which stays on my dock. Its a $4.99 app but it does the following extremely well for me:

1. Synchs beautifully with Google Reader and is fast.  It allows me to organize my folders, move them up and down and importantly very easily “Mark all as Read”

Below is a snapshot of my Feeds and a folder creatively named ‘Top News” that I keep a close watch on every day.

2) Newsstand has a lot of social goodness to share through Twitter, Delicious, ReadItLater and Instapaper

What’s Missing:
—bit.ly so that I can track data on the links I share as I do on Tweetie 2 with my API key.
—Sharing on Facebook
—Ability to RT or @respond to my twitter stream that I subscribe to as an RSS feed from within Google Reader.

Before social media, I always shared news via email to specific people. Now I have replaced email with these easy tools:
—Twitthat bookmarklet. One click.
—Twitterbar a Firefox Add-on customized with a prefix. One click.

—Google Reader’s Share is connected to my Twitter account. One click.
—Facebook Share bookmarklet or if I want it all on one place, I recommend Shareaholic.

Screen 3 – TV. I do not get my news here since I watch very little TV.

Screen 4 – eReader
I have a Kindle that I use to read books and have not switched from print to this one yet for news. As you can imagine, I get enough news on my other screens all day and like some time away from it.

Below is a visual of how I personally share news and the tools I use. Everything goes through Twitterfeed as my central hub for news going in and out.  Note that lately I stand undecided between Seesmic and Tweetdeck. (Image courtesy: Zurb, click to enlarge).

I spend a significant amount of money on news—4 print magazines, 2 newspapers with one online and iPhone apps.

The only screen I care about:

• well written analysis
• Unique and timely content/information
• Thought provoking story telling
• “Connection” with the writer—literally or figuratively from a style perspective
• Delivery channel. Find me—the “paperboy route” has changed

How do you screen the news?

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.

As you’d expect, clicking on any headline opens that story (in a new browser window). Thumbnail pictures are also pulled in for main headlines. And there’s a ‘back’ button to make navigation easy.

Even if you don’t have an officially supported device, anyone can access the new site by visiting techmeme.com/m/. But why not do a native application, such as an iPhone app? “We might make a native app in the future, but with Android phones multiplying and capable browsers appearing on so many devices, it just made sense to start with something with broader support,” founder Gabe Rivera tells us.

Just yesterday, Techmeme announced that it had doubled it staff to 6 people.

This message currently graces every page on Engadget. We’re not sure what they’re up to [Update: Yes we are.], 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):

Not ones to be left out of a super awesome please-refresh-our-page-every-5-seconds-party, we have a page of our own now (below):

(And before we start an Internet flame war, we’re just having some good clean fun with our friends at Engadget. We too are interested to see what their surprise is.)

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.

When Rivera announced the addition of a human editor last year, it caused some controversy. Many people believed that only using a set of algorithms for surfacing news was better because it would take out much of the bias that a human might introduce to the system. But Rivera believes this curation is an integral part of the process to help with fast breaking news and to better filter out spam and old news being re-reported.

The result is a site that seems to be head and shoulders above other tech new aggregators, including Google News, which is quite bad. Maybe we’re a bit biased, since we sit atop Techmeme’s Leaderboard, but the other praise Techmeme has gotten throughout the years doesn’t lie (see the BlurbLog on the side of Rivera’s blog post).

Techmeme is also clearly Twitter-crazy now. Several months ago they added a way to tip stories to the site using the “tip @techmeme” syntax in tweets. That continues to be a valuable part of the site. Today, Rivera is highlight a Techmeme Twitter team list as well.

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. Mishkin’s main argument is that:

The vast majority of the value gets captured by aggregators linking and scraping rather than by the news organizations that get linked and scraped.

It is not really clear whom he is calling an aggregator—actual news aggregators like Yahoo News, Google News, Digg, Techmeme and the Huffington Post, or anyone who links to a news story. After all, he equates the entire web to the blogosphere, which says more about his parochial industry view than about the web. In his mind, the web is the enemy and links are bad.

What really seems to concern him, however, are news aggregation sites. They threaten newspapers because they are emerging as the new front page which people skim every morning for headlines instead of going to any single newspaper site. Mishkin argues:

Historically, the value of those casual browsers was captured by the newspaper because the readers would have to buy a copy. Now all the value gets captured by the aggregator that scrapes the copy and creates a front page that a set of readers choose to scan.

Set aside for a second that ads on news aggregation sites are usually worth a lot less than ads on original content sites and thus they are not capturing the same value. More to the point, when I first read this my immediate response was that the value of news sites does not come from getting people to skim headlines, but to actually click through and read the actual stories. 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. Each story stands on its own in a world of atomized content where readers can come from anywhere on the Web, not just the front page. Now in addition to the front page, there are a million side doors. Reader lock-in is gone. The sooner newspapers get used to that concept, the sooner they can start to adapt and survive.

Which brings us back to the value of news aggregators. The newspaper industry is looking for someone to blame. Usually, it’s Google, but really anyone on the Web will do. Rather than blame the aggregators, news site should take advantage of them. On the Web, every side door can be a front page, whether it is Google News or search or Digg or Twitter or a feed reader or My Yahoo. I’ve said this before about Google, but it applies to any site that links to the news:

Google does not control the news, it exposes it. . . . It is incumbent upon each of us to attract an audience by having something original or interesting to say.

And if a news site or a blog can say enough interesting things enough times that news aggregators (or other sites) keep linking to them, then they can build up their brand and reader loyalty. Maybe readers will click on those links if they see it is coming from a trusted source, and then maybe some of those will start coming to the news site itself on a regular basis. But that loyalty must be earned every day, story by story, post by post. The more front pages (or side pages) which point to a news site’s stories, the more chances it has to gain that loyalty.

But the days of the media bundle when readers got all of the day’s news from one site are long gone. So too are gone the cushy days when newspapers could count “casual browsers” as real readers and sell them to advertisers. Newspapers had better get used to a world where links exist and can whisk readers away as quickly as they bring them. Those who don’t will learn that trying to recreate the past is a sure a path to an early grave.

(Flickr Photo: John Vachon/Library of Congress)

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:

What caught my attention was that some industrious individual (@travisketchum) had left a comment on the TechCrunch article that he had been doing some digging around on the website and had found a link to their development environment. What we found ourselves was that our retweet button Javascript and the WordPress plugin code seemed to have been directly copied from ours.

Update: ReTweet (or at least its holding company Mesiab Labs) responds.

He had to look no further than the code for the retweet button itself. The code below is what he found, which he says is “an exact copy of our own retweet button code with the word ‘tweetmeme’ replaced with ‘retweet’”.

(function()
{
var _url=window.location.href;
var _url=_url.replace(/((?:\?|&)?fbc_receiver=.+)?(?:#.*)?$/,”");
var url=((typeof retweet_url==”string”)?retweet_url:((typeof retweet_URL==”string”)?retweet_URL:_url)).replace(/\+/g,”%2b”);
var source=(typeof retweet_source==”string”)?escape(retweet_source):((typeof retweet_SOURCE==”string”)?escape(retweet_SOURCE):false);
var style=(typeof retweet_style==”string”)?escape(retweet_style):((typeof retweet_STYLE==”string”)?escape(retweet_STYLE):”normal”);
var src=”http://174.129.199.128/meme/widget/tweets/”;
switch(style){
case”compact”:
var h=20;var w=90;break;
case”rednose”:var h=71;var w=60;break;default:var h=71;var w=60;break
}
src+=url;
if(source!=false)
{
src+=”&source=”+source
}
document.write(”);
retweet_url=null;
retweet_URL=null;
retweet_source=null;
retweet_SOURCE=null;
retweet_style=null;
retweet_STYLE=null})();

I just hope all of these startups realize that Twitter could just end up trademarking the term just like they did with Tweet.

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).

And there’s more. The group behind Retweet.com, Mesiab Labs (which seems to have a poor reputation among the Twitter community for products like Hummingbird, that some have accussed of spamming others), has a few sites related to Retweet.com that are already live. One is the URL shortener RT.nu, which will clearly be used to send out the retweets from Retweet.com. Another site, Checkretweet, scours Twitter for retweets for any user. Each of these play into the bigger strategy of the site, according to this blog post. And here’s the key nugget from that post, “Together, these systems allow us to detect and deliver breaking news faster than any other media outlet at present.”

So it looks like they’re setting up Retweet to take on not only TweetMeme, but also Digg, Google News, Techmeme and the new service that Bit.ly is working on. They key to all of this is obviously the links that are getting tweeted out and then retweeted. And because the latter word is entering the lexicon of the web, Retweet.com has a pretty awesome domain for trying to come along with a new service in this field.

That little trademark sign in the upper right hand corner of the logo is also interesting. It may just be for the logo, because it seems like they might have a hard time trademarking the word “retweet.” Though, that would be a potentially very scary situation for TweetMeme and all those little green buttons.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves though, Retweet.com still has to execute — and launch. But this is probably something to watch.

[thanks Orli]

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. As I wrote before, I quickly fell in love with Streamy for that particular aspect of sifting through mountains of information on a daily basis, partly because it allows me to both track blogs and news sites I subscribe to and keep track of what Twitter and the people I follow on there as well as on Facebook and FriendFeed are buzzing about.

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. Techfuga was another one, but it recently ground to a halt.

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. Glad to be of service.

TIN complements the websites and services described above perfectly, and competes with neither one of them. If anything, it saves me a lot of time and rids me of the pain of going to Google News / Blogsearch all the time to learn what the most recent stories in tech or centered around a company in particular are.

What I like about it? The big fat stock quote in the upper corner, the fact that you can filter down to 20 of the most discussed tech companies (note the Google Investor News screenshot below), the decent search function and the speed with which it updates news feeds (every 5 minutes or so, with some human editing involved). But what I also like is the fact that you can narrow your news consumption down to a specific set of categories which makes it very easy to find specific information (for instance, you can opt to display only stories about ‘Steve Jobs’ or ‘Rumors’ when browsing for news on Apple).

TIN is a project bootstrapped by a self-described ‘media nut’ / investor called Frank Cioffi, who spent decades working in such media as radio and television and turned to the internet after many years of consulting and trading stocks. Cioffi got the idea for Tech Investor News to scratch his own itch, and that’s always a good way to start something that other people – like me – could also find interesting.

Bookmarked!

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.

The only web service that I’ve ever seen pop up of which I thought it could potentially become a real Techmeme competitor was Techfuga, a site that mimicked Techmeme in many ways but added some extra bells and whistles (like Twitter search, for example). At launch, the site garnered quite a bit of positive commentary. Louis Gray said Techfuga was the result of mating between Techmeme and Alltop, and Robert Scoble said the site was showing Techmeme how to innovate. But don’t bother going to the site right now to check if they were right. It’s been down for a few days and you won’t see it come back up again for a couple of months.

While we’re still awaiting a formal response from Techfuga founder Joao Azevedo, we gather from his latest tweets and FriendFeed chatter that he plans to rebuild the entire platform and come back with a completely overhauled Techfuga in a couple of months. It’s beyond me why the startup doesn’t just keep this version live and switch to the new one whenever it’s ready for prime time, but Joao says on FriendFeed that this is because of “set up and costs management during this development time”. Judging from its traffic estimates, I doubt a lot of people are actually going to miss it.

That said, I do hope they come back with something awesome, because I happen to think we need more competition in this space.

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 stories about 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 can follow SkyGridHealth or SkyGridEnergy for sector-related news. SkyGrid currently has separate Twitter feeds for 8 different industries. SkyGrid says that the Twitter feed may be especially useful to users who want to access SkyGrid on their mobile devices.

Similar to TechMeme and Google News, SkyGrid clusters related news stories based on keyword analysis, what they’re linking to, etc. SkyGrid also tries to determine the sentiment of each article – red for negative, green for positive.

As we wrote in our earlier review of the services, SkyGrid is an incredibly useful tool, especially now that it is free. But the one element that is missing from SkyGrid is coverage of larger private companies, like Facebook. In order to become a serious competitor to popular aggregators like Techmeme (which also has a Twitter firehose), the site will need to expand its range of coverage. But especially for people in the financial services industries who use Twitter as a news source, SkyGrid is on the right track to providing users with real-time valuable financial news.