Shooting at Bubbles

I find it interesting that at a point where everything seems to have to do with algorithms being the solution two things are knocking the stuffing out of that idea. First is the larger idea of real-time search through the use of Twitter data being accumulated every second of the day and being parsed by the search engine giants.

Then we have news yesterday that Techmeme has expanded its lineup of human editors with the addition of three more people to bring the total up to six (seven if you count @atul). As Alan Patrick at Broadstuff pointed out

Signals two things:
(i) Pure algorithm aggregation is not efficient enough, it needs an edi…. sorry, “curator” is the New Word.
(ii) This impacts the economic scalability of the electronic aggregation newspaper story (we assume this is to give them 24x7x365 curation coverage rather than just increased story covearge per se).

To which Tom Foremski added:

This is significant because Techmeme shows that human aided algorithms are more effective than just software and server. Techmeme is a microcosm of the rest of the search-enabled world of services, from news aggregators to basic search.

If Techmeme can’t be Techmeme just by using its algorithms, and now needs lots of editors, then that means much larger news aggregators and search companies will likely have to add human editors too.

It would seem that Jerry had it right all those years ago when he was hand creating Yahoo’s famous links.