Posts with tag "Techmeme"

Techmeme and the irony of censorship

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Posted 1253 days ago

Censorship_for_Dummies This morning when I finally dragged myself into my office here at home with coffee cup full of the much needed morning nectar I decided to check out how the news about Google supposedly growing a set of balls was doing on Techmeme.

Well at that point, just as now, it was the top subject with just about everyone and their brother jumping on the pageview bandwagon.

Except for one. Nowhere in that massive list of connected blogs will you see The Inquisitr. This is besides the fact that my first post with the news went up at The Inquisitr at 3:40 PM PST – just 40 minutes after the official post went up on the official Google blog. But then neither did my analysis post that went up at 6:19 PM PST.

CobWEBs Daily Edition podcast: ChromeOS a road to free computers, and Techmeme still sucks

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Posted 1308 days ago

cbn1-podbase Both Mark and myself promised that we were not going to talk about ChromeOS but as you can tell from the title we kind of fell off that plan but at the same time we did try and talk about something a little more interesting, that being Techmeme. The news there being that they have added some more human curators to make sure we get the *cough* best *cough* out there.

Of course we both noticed that even with all the linked blogs to the news about ChromeOS neither one of us show up in the list. It’s understandable as to why my story at The Inquisitr doesn’t get listed but I didn’t think that SiliconAngle; which is where Mark’s post is, had been blacklisted would be ignored. Mark assured me that as far as he knows he hasn’t done anything to cause Gabe to blacklist him.

The interesting conversation really has to be near the end when we both turn to talking about some new web based operating system that Google is going to launch in a year. Both of us also think we may have figured out the long term play behind ChromeOS and really if we’re right it could be a really interesting time.

Posts referred to in the show.

Gee maybe Jerry Yang had it right in the beginning – Shooting at Bubbles
Google Chrome OS – so is it worth all the fuss? (Round-up) – The Inquisitr
Chrome OS Isn’t an Anti-Microsoft, Anti-Apple Play [Gratuitous Backpatting] – SiliconAngle
Google ChromeOS on Techmeme
What ChromeOS Means For Netbooks And Why Microsoft Needs To Be Scared – TechCrunch

Enjoy the show.

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Gee maybe Jerry Yang had it right in the beginning

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Posted 1308 days ago

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.

Calling out Gabe and Techmeme over favoritism and censorship

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18 comments
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Posted 1375 days ago

Note: this is a rant post and as such I make no promises that my language won’t get ‘cranky’ so it’s up to you if you continue reading. As well this post is written without any knowledge on Duncan Riley’s part (and hopefully doesn’t get me fired or slapped around too hard).

techmeme_lb For almost the last year I have been a staff writer for Duncan Riley’s The Inquisitr and it has been a great experience – a blogger couldn’t ask for a better boss. With the odd exception the majority of my posts at The Inquisitr are about technology and cover the basic newsy type stuff through to opinion. This means more often than not I am talking about current tech topics that everyone else is talking about.

By current I mean topics that are hitting Techmeme and producing traffic. Except not once in the whole time I have been at The Inquisitr has one single post I have written ever made it on to Techmeme even though those posts contain the same linking other posts on Techmeme do (which is one of their prerequisites). At the same time posts I have written here and at WinExtra are regularly listed (maybe not anymore after this <shrug>).

Digg to do sponsored post ads – where’s the Blogging Purity Patrol?

Category: Technology
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Posted 1477 days ago

bad-blogger-killing-kit When it comes to the blogosphere, especially the tech sector, advertising is an extremely touchy subject. None is more explosive than when the subject turns to sponsored posts. You want to see the Blogging Purity Patrol™ come screaming for blogger blood just run a sponsored post, or even just write about them.

So it will be interesting to see what the overall reaction will be at the announcement that Digg will be launching their own advertising platform – Digg Ads – in the next few months. The key part of this new platform is the placing of sponsored posts (ads) within the Digg river of news and users of the site will be able to digg (vote) the ad up or down.

Yes, the very thing that gets the Blogger Purity Patrol™ to whip out the cloves of garlic and start sharpening stakes is coming to Digg.

You know what though?

I will bet that the reaction will be a great big so what. After all it’s not like all the big names aren’t already running ads as part of their news postings. Techmeme does it, TechCrunch does it (even though they spin it as thank you posts for their advertisers), VentureBeat does it, ReadWriteWeb does it (which hilarious given Marshall Kirkpatrick’s much publicized hatred for the soulless and evil bloggers who run sponsored posts).

In other words if you are a big name blogger it’s okay and considering that Digg is still a powerhouse of the social media web no-one is going to say squat against this move. but if I were to run a sponsored post, or my friend Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins was to run one, or my other podcast partner Sean P. Aune did we would be roundly crucified with garlic coming out of our asses.

We would be accused of selling out our readers and told to hand in our blogger credentials. I don’t see anyone asking all those big boys to hand theirs over, instead they just keep on posting sponsored post and collecting a lot of money.

So tell me WTF is up with that?

Post Redux: A 140 Characters doesn’t mean the death of blogging

Category: Technology
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Posted 1480 days ago

As a result of moving to the new domain and blog identity I’ve been going through my old posts cleaning up URLs and tags. Through this process I’ve been finding posts that I really liked when I first wrote them and think that still apply at this point in time. So I have decided to repost them as part of a regular Sunday feature, well at least until I get all caught up.
At the bottom of the repost I will also update the original post with any new thoughts that I might have had since orginally publishing the selected post; along with any corrections that need to be made.

Originally published October 2, 2007

There are always a lot of stupid statements that get floated around the blogosphere but one of the stupidest has to be from Robert Scoble’s post yesterday where he equated the new Techmeme Leaderboard as the death knell for blogging. Along with that piece of wisdom he added another sign of dire times for blogging is the rise of Twitter as a medium to share your life with your followers.

Robert may be looked upon by many in the tech world as the leading voice of trends in the tech blogosphere but with his recent love affair with Twitter and Facebook and them being the end all be all for all our social needs I am beginning to wonder if Robert has discovered a way to marginalizes himself in the larger blogosphere.

His supposition that Twitter gives us better insights into what is going on all within the context of 140 characters is as about as lame as him saying that the idea of lists is lame. While such things as Technorati and Techmeme rankings might be lame for him, for career bloggers these types of metrics are both a measure of popularity and valuation when it comes to calculating their worth for advertising dollars.

Just because he has never had to be in a position of needing to monetize his blog doesn’t prove that the lists; of which he has always been a fixture, aren’t an important gauge of who is worth reading along with providing an important valuation system.

We might live in a sound-bite world but to suggest that 140 characters is more than enough to share news and information is stupid. As Frank Shaw said in a post today:

The bigger point here is that the medium is maturing. After a long time of delayed response, the field of journalism has responded by being faster, more detailed, better resourced in order to compete. I see this as a good thing. Blogging remains a hugely powerful way for people to receive information, and the ability for an authoritive voice to quickly rise to prominence is as strong today as it was two years or three years ago.

Robert might want to live within the confines of 140 characters or behind the walled world of Facebook but to suggest that this medium is on its deathbed because of a 140 characters and a some new listing metric is ridiculous and only goes to show that Robert is losing touch.

Update: If anything the attitude that blogging is being replaced by things like Twitter, Friendfeed or just about any new social media service that lets you blast out your thoughts in a shotgun blast is getting only stronger. Yet blogging in a lot of ways is in my opinion only getting better so perhaps this whole micro-blogging thing is good for bloggers. While everyone else is playing around with 140 characters we can concentrate on producing quality content.

Does an Authority Index even mean anything anymore?

Category: Technology
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10 comments
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Posted 1562 days ago

From the early days of blogging there has always been talk about the upper level of writers who were often referred to as the A-List of blogging. This was all derived from the Technorati leader board that listed the top 100 blogs in the world. Over the past couple of years though this list has grown to mean less and less.

Part of the reason was that increasingly we were seeing mainstream media showing up on the list as they began to embrace the social media world and blogging. As with Techmeme the individual blogs began to fade from these Authority Indexes being replaced with the likes of The New York Times blogs and even faux corporate blogs that didn’t do much more that post press releases.

However their effect on the concept of the Authority Index is nothing compared, in my opinion, to the effect that services like Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook ultimately have had on it. You see the idea behind the Authority Index is that it was the measure of the number of links to any blog from other blogs within a 60 day period. With the burgeoning popularity of things like Twitter we find that links are being spread further afield from blogs.

As this trend increases – which it will – the value of links in blog posts as a way to measure another blog’s value decreases. Rather than people posting interesting links on their blogs they are posting them instead to Twitter or FriendFeed. As Brian Solis points out

As the social Web and new services continue the migration and permeation into everything we do online, attention is not scalable. Many refer to this dilemma as attention scarcity or continuous partial attention (CPA) – an increasingly thinning state of focus. It’s affecting how and what we consume, when, and more importantly, how we react, participate and share. That something is forever vying for our attention and relentlessly pushing us to do more with less driven by the omnipresent fear of potentially missing what’s next.

We are learning to publish and react to content in “Twitter time” and I’d argue that many of us are spending less time blogging, commenting directly on blogs, or writing blogs in response to blog sources because of our active participation in micro communities.

All this change therefore begs the question – is the idea of an Authority Index now something of the past or can it be modernized to take into account these micro communities?

A dash of Techmeme, a splash of Alltop and you have – TechFuga

Category: Technology
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7 comments
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Posted 1633 days ago

I had seen mention of the new news aggregation site TechFuga a week or so ago but didn’t really look into it as I figured that I had enough aggregators churning the waters. Then tonight I saw a comment on FriendFeed by Robert Scoble where he was pointing to it while tearing Gabe Rivera of Techmeme a new one so I figured what the hell – let’s have a look. For a change I’m glad I did because I gotta admit TechFuga is pretty sweet.

So what is TechFuga?

Well as the headline to this post suggests .. if you were to take Techmeme and Guy Kawasaki’s AllTop, mash them together – you would end up with TechFuga except I personally think it is better than either of them.