As part of news aggregator Techmeme‘s big redesign a couple weeks ago, it moved its flow of top stories to the left to make room for… white space. But founder Gabe Rivera promised at the time that there’d be stuff coming to fill it, and now we know what — an events calendar for the tech world.
It’s a play to solidify the site’s position as the watercooler for anyone in tech, especially in Silicon Valley. In a post on the addition today, he says that while anyone can submit an event (sort of like its job board), there’s a specific thing that will earn a place in the calendar: “we’ll include events that are expected to produce the kind of news that appears on Techmeme” (his bolding, not mine).
There are already a variety of calendars out there for tech-related stuff. Searching Meetup in the Bay Area will yield a lot of quality casual tech gatherings for instance. But there’s no one dominant tech calendar, filtered for interestingness… like there’s no dominant news aggregator for tech news besides Techmeme. So, the addition is a logical fit to help make Techmeme even more relevant to its readers.
More details on listing criteria, from his post:
For example, events involving major announcements or product launches, or conferences including candid interviews with a major industry figures. As such, we will also include events like earnings announcements (of the more bellwether variety), scheduled project launches, and other kinds of virtual events that one cannot attend in body, but only in browser.
Basic listings are free, but if accepted, event organizers can pay for yellow bolding and a “Register Now” button that links to their event site.
We’ll see what the team fills the rest of the white space with.