The husband and wife behind BallHype and ShowHype, two Digg clones that focus on baseball and entertainment news, have earned a modest pay day: $3 million from media group Future US. That’s not bad given the two never raised institutional funding since launching the first site (BallHype) in April 2007. Users of BallHype and ShowHype (which launched in October 2007) vote up their favorite… → Read More
Gabe Rivera finally added search to Techmeme last month. But already he is making it much better. Rivera just added a nice prospective search feature to the site. Anytime you search Techmeme, you can subscribe to future search results for the same term through an RSS feed. Just click on the RSS icon in your browser after you do a search, and you will get a feed for stories that appear on Techmeme… → Read More
Who knew Duncan Riley was such a Greasemonkey? My former colleague just made FriendFeed a lot more useful for people on Firefox. Using Greasemonkey, an add-on to Firefox that lets developers customize Webpages through the browser, he created some scripts that add tabs to FriendFeed and that make it even more of a super start page than it already is. He got the idea from this app called FriendFeed… → Read More
Tech news site TechMeme launched on September 12, 2005. It was an immediate hit and remains the most important blog news aggregator: Dan Farber wrote perhaps the best description of the site to date, back in 2007: “TechMeme provides a one-page, aggregated, filtered, archiveable summary in near real-time of what is new and generating conversation.” But right from the start people noted… → Read More
This is a follow up to our post last month that listed some of the top tech bloggers according to TechMeme. The goal was to be able to take a look at the individual bloggers who were writing headlines, not just the blogs they wrote for. As promised, the team (Mark McGranaghan and Henry Work) has put together much more detailed statistics on the blogs and bloggers that publish tech news headlines… → Read More
One of the favorite bitchmeme’s on Techmeme, the popular blog and news headline site that keeps track of the most talked-about tech stories on the Web, is that it is dominated by A-list blogs and news sites with full-time writing staffs. Because of this professionalization of the blogosphere, the argument goes, lone bloggers are being pushed out of the conversation. TechCrunch is sometimes… → Read More
We’ve been analyzing historical TechMeme data to dig a little deeper than the leaderboard information on the site that shows top blogs over the trailing 30 days. Mark McGranaghan and I are slicing the data in a number of ways and will publish it shortly on CrunchBase. For now we thought we’d show a teaser – below are the top 100 tech bloggers/authors, based on the total number of… → Read More
There’s been much discussion lately around ways to follow and keep up with friends and the latest news in the tech world. There are plenty of new startups looking to make life easier; many have merit, but here’s a few tips to help you know what’s going on. A Good FeedReader Many consider that understanding and subscribing to feeds is a given, but the reality is that terms like… → Read More
Digg competitor Mixx continues to impress us with new features (although the exodus of Digg users to them may have been short lived). A new feature launches this week on Mixx called Related Items. It solves a common problem found on Digg and other sites where multiple articles on the same story compete with each other to get to the home page. One person may submit a story from USAToday. Another… → Read More
The last time I was in the Valley I spent a decent 90 minutes catching up with Techmeme’s Gabe Rivera on Michael’s lounge (sorry, couch). As I do every time I catch up with Gabe, I endeavored to get him to spill the secrets of Techmeme’s algorithm, then shortly there after I offered him money to license the script (having failed on three previous attempts to get someone on… → Read More
On the evening of March 6, 2008 I’ll be moderating a Churchill Club panel discussion in San Francisco on “Bootstrapping As A Start-Up.” Participants include Sean Byrnes (CEO Flurry), Craig Newmark (Founder Craigslist), Gabe Rivera (Founder TechMeme), and Stephen Weir (CEO MadeIt). The discussion will be around starting and growing a startup without outside funding. This is a very… → Read More
It had to happen sooner or later. We’ve had Technorati. We’ve had TechMeme. Now we have Tweetmeme, which will track what’s hot on micro-blogging platform Twitter. The business of tracking the online conversation just a got shot in the arm a big hit with the tech equivalent of crack cocaine. Built by the makers Fav.or.it, a yet-to-launch blog commenting system, and based on an… → Read More
http://www.labnol.org/assets/flash-video/labnol-flvplayer.swf Amit Agarwal at Labnol created a video that shows an image of the TechMeme home page taken page every five minutes. 500 screen shots total are shown over a fifty hour period, sped up so that it all fits in a 50-second video. See how headlines develop, grow and eventually shrink over time. A high res version is here. CrunchBase… → Read More
This will be the third annual post on “Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without.” The first post, for 2006, is here. The 2007 post, written a year ago, is here. This is a list of the products I tend to use daily. Some are for work (WordPress, Delicious, Google Docs, etc.), some are for fun (Amazon Music, Amie Street, etc), and some are useful for both (Digg, Skype, YouTube… → Read More
We’ve praised new hosted forum startup Tangler on a number of occasions – most recently calling it the bleeding edge in new discussion board/forum startups. Apparently someone else likes it too. Someone in Turkey is willing to pay up to $1,500 to anyone who can “clone Tangler.” But don’t go too far – the listing also states “do not steal tangler.com images… → Read More
On Thursday we covered the official launch of the NY Times Blogrunner product. Blogrunner was specifically positioned as a Techmeme-like blog news aggregator, albeit with a human touch to help pick good stories when the algorithm isn’t quite up to the task (Techmeme is 100% algorithm based news). When we wrote that initial story we said we’d report back on how much traffic was referred… → Read More
Last night, the New York Times quietly launched Blogrunner on the technology section of its main site. Blogrunner was one of many techmeme copycat sites, until the New York Times bought it last year. Like Techmeme, Blogrunner is a service that keeps track of the latest news and blog posts on a range of topics (Politics, Technology, Media, Business, Economy, Law, Health, Movies, Books, Religion… → Read More
Gabe Rivera’s latest leaderboard product Memeorandum Leaderboard is now live with some interesting results for the political blogosphere. According to the list, based on story headlines on Memeorandum the New York Times, Washington Post and AP control over 22.4% of political headlines. The Atlantic Online, The National Review and CNN (twice) also make the top ten, leaving slim pickings for… → Read More
A year ago everyone (including me) was talking about how social news startups like Digg and Reddit were removing the need for news editors. Why should a human, with all his/her subjectivity and bias, decide what news is appropriate for us to consume on any given day, when the crowd can decide by simply voting? But even as Digg continues to gain traffic and new users, some people just can’t… → Read More
Techmeme’s new popular list product Leaderboard launched today, and the reaction has been interesting. Some are suggesting that it’s not a representative list, others (well Scoble) are suggesting that it is the death of blogs. First the big news: more Meme Leaderboard products are on the way, with Leaderboards to be launched for Gabe Rivera’s other sites Memeorandum, WeSmirch and… → Read More
The TechMeme Leaderboard, which we wrote about last night, is now live. See it here. Founder Gabe Rivera’s announcement of the new site is here. The leaderboard shows the top 100 news sources, ranked by the number of headlines attributed to that blog on TechMeme over the previous thirty days. Archives of previous lists will be available, and an OPML file of all included sources can be… → Read More
Update: The leaderboard has launched. See it here. Blog search engine Technorati’s founding CEO is gone, its traffic party has ended and its core search functionality is under long term fire from competitors like Google Blog Search, Ask.com and Sphere (among others). Constant strategic shifts haven’t helped much either. But Technorati still has one stronghold left – it controls… → Read More
http://www.kyte.tv/flash.swf?embedId=6357068&appKey=MarbachViewerEmbedded&uri=channels/6118http://media01.kyte.tv/images/updatenotice.swf Above is part 3 of a 3 part Robert Scoble video blog series on “Why Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are going to kick Google’s butt in four years.” To see the other parts scroll on the player; Part 2 at around the 6 minute mark gets to the… → Read More
Stocks.us recently surfaced in the TechCrunch Forums. It’s an aggregator around public company stock news that has a suspiciously similar approach and look/feel as blog news aggregator TechMeme. The site groups news items from major media (Reuters, WSJ, USAToday, etc.). Lots of stories = higher placement on the site. Newer stories are linked in the right sidebar. It updates every 15 minutes. → Read More
TechMeme‘s blog news search engine is gaining popularity and becoming increasingly influential. Perhaps too influential. Dave Winer, who writes the popular and venerable blog Scripting.com, has requested that TechMeme stop indexing his site. TechMeme automatically determines news headlines on its site by analyzing linking patterns among influential blogs (“influential” being… → Read More
A year ago I wrote a post called “Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without” and listed thirteen startups whose products made a real impact in my life. Those were the products that I loved, and used every day. I enjoyed sorting through the hundreds of startups that we had written about, and picking just a handful that made a real impact on my life. It was so much fun, actually, that… → Read More
Popular blog news site TechMeme launched archives of its various technology, politics, baseball and celebrity gossip sites this morning. The new sites show a “river of news” display of news headlines over the previous five days. Founder Gabe Rivera told me earlier today that he also plans on including links to older archives as well in this format. This is also an alternate view of the… → Read More
TechMeme (formerly tech.memeorandum) is a site that bloggers and others check frequently for news. It is an entirely automated web service that looks at what bloggers are talking about, and linking to, and decides what is news based on that analysis. In many ways it is an anti-Digg. Humans have no say in what appears on the TechMeme homepage, other than by blogging about it. TechMeme is focused on… → Read More
This is the last time I will write about Memeorandum because, thank God, it has been renamed by founder Gabe Rivera. The technology part of the blog aggregator Memeorandum, formerly at tech.memeorandum.com, is now TechMeme. Thank you Gabe, for finally taking that name out back and shooting it. I can’t tell you how many times I mistyped it. My previous posts on Memeorandum, now TechMeme, are… → Read More
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