Techmeme offers tech news at internet speed, as it happens

News lovers in Washington can’t live without Mike Allen at Politico. Hollywood squabbles over the relative merits of Sharon Waxman’s TheWrap versus Nikki Finke’s Deadline. The newspaper industry reads the news collected by Jim Romenesko.

One of the first websites loaded on Silicon Valley’s laptops and iPhones each morning — and then again and again throughout the day — is Techmeme.

The site, developed by a former Intel engineer, appropriately enough relies on software algorithms to collect technology news in real time into what is essentially the front page of an ever-changing industry newspaper. But Techmeme also turns to humans to filter the ever-growing number of articles and blog posts published online each day, a method that is being used by Mediagazer, a new sister site for media industry news.

A model

Techmeme could become a model for other industries as a useful way to harness the increasingly unwieldy Web and arm readers who are preparing for business meetings or cocktail parties. Techmeme, a start-up company based in San Francisco, also publishes aggregation sites for politics, celebrity gossip and baseball, and hopes to expand to topics like business or energy.

Aggregation works best for “industries where ideas can change people’s view of things, and there’s money on the line,” said Gabe Rivera, Techmeme’s founder. As the Web gets more and more crowded, news aggregators — both general ones like Digg and Google News, and industry-specific ones like Techmeme and Politico’s “early morning tip sheets” — become essential for overwhelmed readers.

They also play a crucial role in contemporary journalism, as media outlets and amateur reporters churn out an ever-higher quantity of often lower-quality content, said Kristian Hammond, director of the Center for Innovation in Technology, Media and Journalism at Northwestern University.

“The editorial strength that may have been lost in terms of writing is going to be re-emerging in control and curation of sites,” he said. “In order to maintain a grip on an industry, you need to be able to go to someplace that looks at and filters all those documents.”

Unlike RSS feeds, which gather everything on preselected sites or blogs, Techmeme groups stories according to importance, and clusters other reporters’ and bloggers’ perspectives on the same topic.

Some aggregation sites, like Google News, rely on software to crawl the Web and spot key words in news stories. This model is fast, but it often misses nuances and different interpretations or developments on the news.

Others, like Digg, ask anyone on the Web to suggest stories, and many readers use Twitter as a user-generated newsfeed. Still others, like Arts & Letters Daily and the Romenesko news media blog of the Poynter Institute, rely on human editors to gather the important stories of the day. Individuals who filter the news bring more editorial expertise, but they are often slower and less comprehensive than a computer, and it is difficult to expand the service to other topics.

Techmeme combines all three strategies, automatically searching the Web, employing editors and accepting tips from readers. Other sites, including Blogrunner, an aggregation site owned by The New York Times Company, also use several of these strategies.

How it started

In 2004, Rivera had received a doctorate in computer science and was working at Intel when he observed that it was difficult to monitor all the blogs sprouting across the Web. He started Memeorandum as an automatic aggregator searching for the political news articles that were most linked to by other sites.

He quit his job a year later and started Techmeme, WeSmirch for celebrity gossip and Ballbug for baseball news.

At first, he listed stories from mainstream news organisations followed by blogger discussion, but that soon changed as bloggers began breaking news. In late 2008, Rivera hired Techmeme’s first editor, Megan McCarthy.

Since then, the site has become more relevant and popular with its 260,000 readers, who check it three million times a month.  “We’re better at anticipating what’s going to be a bigger story than just the algorithm,” said McCarthy, who now manages its new media site, Mediagazer.

The number of people who visit the rival Romenesko media site monthly is down 19 percent since last year, but Romenesko still sometimes beats Mediagazer’s automated site in posting links.

Romenesko says he checks Mediagazer regularly, “to make sure I’m not missing something huge.”

Still, Techmeme does not catch everything and sometimes it catches too much of the same thing. So Bijan Sabet, a venture capitalist at Spark Capital who reads Techmeme daily, also visits other aggregators, like Hacker News, because they have more diversity.
Now that Twitter serves as a broadcast platform, Techmeme plans to include cogent 140-character Twitter posts written by influential people as headlines.

Rivera has never raised outside capital for his company, which makes enough money from running sponsored company blog posts for advertisers like Microsoft, Google and Intel to eke out a small profit. But he said he might seek investors if it expands to other industries.

He thinks that aggregation would work for certain industries, like finance and energy, but he has learned from his less successful sites that aggregation does not work for all topics.

Ballbug is not as popular because most baseball fans want to read news about their home team, not the entire league. And WeSmirch suffers because readers are not interested in eight different takes on Lindsay Lohan’s jail sentencing.

Though Google News, The Huffington Post and other aggregators get accused of stealing page views from other sites because people do not always click on the original article, Rivera says his sites drive new readers who do not have time to check dozens of blogs a day.

“You definitely get a lot more traffic when you’re the lead story in a cluster on Techmeme, and it’s super high-quality traffic because it’s where a lot of industry thought leaders go to get their news,” Kirkpatrick said.