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Is Techmeme myopic?

I’m a big fan of Tech­Meme, a web aggre­ga­tion ser­vice that pro­vides, at a glance, a few of what’s being dis­cussed in the technology-focused part of the blo­gos­phere. It has allowed me to unsub­scribe from a large num­ber of RSS feeds that were pro­vid­ing me with redun­dant infor­ma­tion and I’ve long hoped for a ver­sion of Tech­Meme that would pro­vide me with a cus­tomized view that pro­vid­ing a sim­i­lar user inter­face for my own per­sonal feeds.

Recently, though, Tech­Meme has got­ten me think­ing about the tech blo­gos­phere con­ver­sa­tions as a whole and their longer term rel­e­vance. To the small “web 2.0″ com­mu­nity, Tech­Meme serves as a bit of a paper of record; The sub­head even claims that it rep­re­sents the “Tech Web, page A1”, claim­ing to bring us the impor­tant sto­ries. But how do those sto­ries fare over time? Is today’s hot topic a step in under­stand­ing a longer term trend or is it just a tem­po­rary dis­trac­tion that will be for­got­ten a month/3 months/6 months/a year from now.

For­tu­nately, Gabe Rivera, the founder of Tech­Meme must have antic­i­pated such a ques­tion and pro­vided a way to look at Tech­Meme as it was a par­tic­u­lar point in its short his­tory. Using the sim­ple inter­face, it’s easy to see the page as it existed at a pre­cise point in time. So I decided to start look­ing at the site at the same time in sin­gle month spaces. The mid­dle of the night and mid­dle of the day posi­tion ought to be good time stamps so I decided to look at the site at 12am and 12pm on the selected date. I also had to dis­count the fact that April 1st is April fool’s day so I could not use the first of the month as this fact could skew the data. Here are the dates and times I ended up with:

With 20 data points, here’s what I discovered.

Today

Based on today’s news at noon, it looks like the impor­tant sub­jects at noon in the blo­gos­phere are Adobe’s lat­est move, com­bin­ing Flash and Acro­bat with their entry in the already crowded (Google, Microsoft, Zoho, etc..) web-based office suite mar­ket. At mid­night, things were a lit­tle less excit­ing, with dis­cus­sion around the pri­vacy issues Google Maps is rais­ing with their StreetView offering.

Of course, it’s still too early to tell whether those sto­ries will have a long term impact so let’s roll the tape back a little.

One Week Ago: May 26, 2008

At noon, a week ago, the top story was about a new type of SSD, devel­oped by Sam­sung. Since it’s hard­ware, I assume that the impact of this news can’t be felt ini­tially but there could be longer term reper­cus­sions. Also of note on that page is a small item lower on the page about Pay­pal out­ages. An inter­est­ing trend in my research on this is that this story is slowly devel­op­ing over a period of weeks and months and the noise level appears to be increas­ing on it.

At mid­night, the dis­cus­sion was around Google’s power and the needed for another orga­ni­za­tion to work as a counter bal­ance to that pow­er­ful force in the search engine space. Cou­pled with the dis­cus­sions last night about pri­vacy issues relat­ing to Google maps, it seems we are see­ing an emerg­ing pat­tern here.

Two Weeks Ago: May 19, 2008

Two weeks ago, at noon­time, the claim that Microsoft would even­tu­ally buy Face­book and keep it close was dom­i­nat­ing Tech­Meme. At this point, no announce­ment has been made so this is largely con­jec­ture and, while an inter­est­ing opin­ion, it’s not really news. This edi­to­r­ial was largely in response to the news item that dom­i­nated the pre­vi­ous 12 hour cycle about Microsoft’s state­ments regard­ing pur­su­ing a pos­si­ble deals other than a full acqui­si­tion with Yahoo!

One Month Ago: May 2, 2008

On May 2, 2008 at noon, the big news was… that the Google RSS reader is now avail­able for the iphone. I’m sure many peo­ple con­sider this event as a major turn­ing point when… well, hmm… a big big deal. Amus­ingly, Adobe was also in the news that day, with news that its flash plu­gin would escape com­put­ers and appear in set top boxes and mobile phones.

Another big sub­ject was Steve Ballmer’s men­tion that Microsoft could go it alone with­out Yahoo, a dis­cus­sion that dom­i­nated the mid­night page on that day. The Yahoo/Microsoft chat has been kind of the soap opera of our indus­try and this lat­est install­ment was remem­bered as a turn­ing point (or not) by many.

A pos­si­bly inter­est­ing trend piece, around mid­night, was also intrigu­ing: Will Grand Theft Auto IV hurt Iron Man open­ing week­end sales. I haven’t seen a fol­low up on that piece yet, which could tell us whether video games are dis­plac­ing movies as the pri­mary form of enter­tain­ment but my guess is that the answer is no.

Two Months Ago: April 2, 2008

On April 2, 2008 at noon, the top story on tech­meme was about Intel’s plan for chips that would power up more mobile devices. Inter­est­ingly, this story was largely dri­ven by main­stream media as the lead was taken by john Markoff of the New York Times, fol­lowed by com­ments from Forbes mag­a­zine, and Infoworld. The other related story was the press release itself, which can be seen as blog­gers point­ing straight to the source of the news. I sus­pect that this story will prob­a­bly have more legs mov­ing for­ward. A cur­sory glance pro­vides glances at devel­op­ing sto­ries rang­ing from the rumor stage (that all impor­tant Google/Skype part­ner­ship or acqui­si­tion… which didn’t hap­pen) to the focus on process (like the approval of Office Open XML as an ISO standard).

The depar­ture of Google’s CIO dom­i­nated the prior night’s news cycle and word of Apple’s 3G iphone started to fil­ter through.

Three Months Ago: March 2, 2008

March 2, 2008 at noon pro­vides us per­spec­tive on today’s news, thanks to Microsoft’s announce­ment of ITS entry into the web-based office suite mar­ket. When put side by side with today’s announce­ment by Adobe, it seems to start point­ing to more of a trend. Beyond that, lit­tle news that seems to be of note from a mem­o­rable standpoint.

The inter­est­ing thing here is that the same sub­ject was lead­ing the pre­vi­ous night’s news cycle. This seems to estab­lish a first rule for tech­meme: sub­jects that sur­vive on the front page more than 12 hours may be worth pay­ing atten­tion to.

Six Month Ago: Decem­ber 2, 2007

There’s an all say­ing in jour­nal­ism that 3 items make for a trend. In the case of this study, it looks like Web-based office suite are def­i­nitely the hottest trend around, as the top news on Decem­ber 2, 2007 at noon was infor­ma­tion about the future of Google’s offer­ing in that space (either that or there is an unwrit­ten rule in the tech­nol­ogy field that infor­ma­tion about web-based office suites MUST be intro­duced on the sec­ond day of the month or wait until the fol­low­ing month).

The sub­ject was start­ing to climb the chart 12 hours ear­lier, even thought the dis­cus­sion at the time was dom­i­nated by a Face­book mis­step (remem­ber Face­book Bea­cons? Well, that was around that time). From an inter­face stand­point, it also brings up some­thing that I’d like to rec­om­mend to Gabe: could you add and up or down arrow to high­light if a sub­ject is get­ting more play or not. On some­thing like this, it would be nice to get an idea of the stick­i­ness of a topic. It appears many topic appear low on the page and move up over time, the quicker and faster they move up seems to indi­cate the impor­tance of the story and it would be a nice addi­tion to have that info on the screen.

Nine Month Ago: Sep­tem­ber 2, 2007

Sep­tem­ber 2, 2007 was a quiet news day. I guess every­one was mourn­ing the death of the news­pa­per, which was forced by Google on that day, accord­ing to the noon-time head­lines. There doesn’t seem to have been any other major news around mid­night either. This, how­ever, could be an arti­fact in the data as Sep­tem­ber 2, 2007 was a Sun­day, which is gen­er­ally a pretty quiet news day as most peo­ple don’t work on Sunday.

Inter­est­ingly, a story that is just now start­ing to get more notice is the con­tin­u­ing brush­fires around Paypal’s out­ages. Not that sexy a sub­ject but one that started to be raised around that time. At the time, dis­cus­sion of Google’s entry in the mobile mar­ket cen­tered around the idea they would deliver a device instead of a platform.

Last Year and Two Years Ago

A year ago, at noon, the Tech­meme con­ver­sa­tion was around porn. Dur­ing the night, though, the con­ver­sa­tion was cen­ter­ing around the acqui­si­tion of Feed­burner by Google. This is prob­a­bly remem­bered by peo­ple in the indus­try as an impor­tant mile­stone and here, tech­meme shines at orga­niz­ing a pack­age with the appro­pri­ate conversations.

Things do not improve much if you go fur­ther back: 2 years ago, at noon, and mid­night, gives us lit­tle to mull over.

Con­clu­sion

The data seems to point that the front page of Tech­Meme largely rep­re­sents what’s hot right now but does not nec­es­sar­ily high­light sto­ries which have a longer term type of impact. In that sense, it may also be high­light­ing that dis­cus­sions in the tech blo­gos­phere are largely cen­tered on insider-type minu­tia while fail­ing to put things in a larger con­text. This appears to present a myopic view of the tech world that leaves us with lots of data but pre­ciously lit­tle infor­ma­tion. So while Tech­Meme pro­vides a use­ful tool in terms of get­ting an idea of the pulse of the con­ver­sa­tion “right now,” it does lit­tle in pro­vid­ing data that would allow some­one to under­stand the larger trends that are affect­ing our world as a result of the inter­net (and web 2.0 revolution).

I would argue that the answer to the ques­tion I posed in the title for that post is a resound­ing yes. Because it deals largely with the triv­ial and assess lit­tle value to longer type impact, Tech­Meme cre­ates a self-imposed myopia on its read­ers and par­tic­i­pants. A pos­si­ble excep­tion is when a story man­ages to sur­vives through mul­ti­ple 12-hour instances, pro­vid­ing many angles to the same events. But those events are few and far between.

Whether the lack of head­lines with a major impact is a phe­nom­e­non that is unique to Tech­Meme or to the tech world in gen­eral is a ques­tion I’d like to leave to read­ers and I’d appre­ci­ate com­ments as to your think­ing around this.

But all this comes down to a sim­ple fact: if you’ve missed what hap­pened on Tech­Meme in the last XX hours, days or weeks, you may not nec­es­sar­ily have missed much. so kick back, relax, step away from the com­puter and, if you need to catch up, you can always pick up a main­stream pub­li­ca­tion that may cover a dis­tilled ver­sion of what hap­pened if it’s of any par­tic­u­lar significance.

Originally published on June 2, 2008 in Business, Media, Technology . You may find related thoughts pieces under the following terms: , , , , , , , , ,

  • Pingback: Is Techmeme myopic? « David Strom’s Web Informant

  • http://spap-oop.blogspot.com Tish Grier

    Fas­ci­nat­ing stuff, Tris­tan! Per­son­ally, I view Tech­meme as some­thing of tech blog­gers’ water­cooler, where all types gather around to kib­itz about this or that in the tech world. Now, what goes on in the tech world *may* end up impact­ing the–for lack of a bet­ter term–non-tech world, such as pri­vacy issues re Google’s StreetView, but some of it ends up being noth­ing more than geek-related con­cerns. Still, sto­ries may not make it out of Tech­meme because even the tech world doesn’t see them as big issues (such as pri­vacy con­cerns re Google’s StreetView.)

    I was chas­ing Tech­meme for awhile, and enjoyed the traf­fic boost when I ended up in the “related links.” May even have got a few new read­ers out of it. But after awhile it got to be rather bor­ing and tir­ing. I like tech news, but I also like mar­ket­ing news and stuff about jour­nal­ism. Oh, yeah, and life :-)

  • http://www.tnl.net/blog/ Tris­tan Louis

    hyperorg.comThe wider ques­tion (and one for which I don’t know how to get the data) is actu­ally whether the blo­gop­shere is myopic. I used tech­meme as a proxy here because Gabe is nice enough to pro­vide us with his­tor­i­cal snap­shots. I could prob­a­bly do the same against meme­o­ran­dum and find that the con­ver­sa­tion in the polit­i­cal blo­gos­phere is no better.

    What I’m try­ing to high­light is that many of the peo­ple in the Web 2.0 crowd are dri­ving them­selves crazy (think Om Malik, Marc Orchant) with con­stant updates and amounts of work that are just unsus­tain­able in the long run. And the ques­tion is… for what? Are we cov­er­ing the big trends or just obsess­ing about navel gaz­ing? Sadly, it looks like it may be the latter.

    I was recently read­ing an amaz­ing arti­cle on JOHO and I sus­pect that it sub­con­ciously tugged me to do the research for the piece above :)

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  • gre­gory

    it is not that it deals with the triv­ial, but with the transitory

    same data if you did an analy­sis of cloud pat­terns at the same dates … things change, that is called the river of life … what is impor­tant, is the river itself

    about myopia hmm, big pic­ture, every­thing is one, small pic­ture, every indi­vid­ual is totally myopic, in com­par­i­son to the whole

  • http://www.techmeme.com/ Gabe

    First obser­va­tion: I think in the past peo­ple have said the same about news in gen­eral, and Tech­meme, while spe­cial and novel in a num­ber of ways, is still a news site.

    Any­way, the core prob­lem here is that peo­ple can’t pre­dict that future. Even so, if you con­sider the most impor­tant events over the past cou­ple of years, you’ll see head­lines related to those events scat­tered across Tech­meme before they hap­pen. So for the forward-looking, the value may not be in the typ­i­cal head­line, but it’s still there.

    I dunno how typ­i­cal I was, but on Sep­tem­ber 10, 2001, thanks to “news”, I was already fairly up to speed on issues sur­round­ing al-Qaeda, the Tal­iban, Afghanistan, etc. Any news­pa­per edi­tion prior to 9/11 viewed in iso­la­tion would appear to be a poor back­ground for the events to come. And yet taken as a whole, the cov­er­age from pre­ced­ing years did at least lay out the issues.

  • paul

    the pass­ing cloud anal­ogy is a good point. You are look­ing at a data stream with an enor­mous amount of noise, and hop­ing that a hand­ful of sam­plings will give you mean­ing­ful data. I doubt it. You need a mech­a­nism to sam­ple far more fre­quently and search for pat­terns. Your lit­tle exer­cise is anec­do­tal at best, mis­lead­ing at worst.

  • http://www.tnl.net/blog/ Tris­tan Louis

    Gabe: you may be high­light­ing an inter­est­ing phe­nom­e­non in terms of the news busi­ness that has has less to do with pre­dict­ing the future that pro­vid­ing con­text. A lot of what con­cerns me, in the data I’m see­ing (and granted, it was only a cur­sory look) is that there is a lot of noise but pre­cious lit­tle sig­nal. One would assume that, since tech­meme is based on what peo­ple are dis­cussing, the level of sig­nal would be higher. I’m not sure whether it is a tech­meme issue or a blo­gos­phere issue: are we pre­oc­cu­py­ing our­selves with use­less minu­tiae instead of try­ing to pro­vide context/background/understanding to what is cur­rently being cov­ered. I’m not sure what the answer is, to be hon­est but my gut tells me that this dataset points to some­thing deeper than what I’ve man­aged to get to.

    Paul (and gre­gory): I love the cloud anal­ogy. It makes a lot of sense. I’m actu­ally thank­ful for Gabe prov­ing the his­tor­i­cal data BECAUSE it allows to take a quick glance. I guess I should get crack­ing on some code that would pull head­lines for every day over a year to get more per­spec­tive. If any reader is inter­ested in get­ting me the data set, I’ll slog through it and will try to ana­lyze it.

  • http://www.techmeme.com/ Gabe

    Tris­tan: well, I think uncer­tainty and the dif­fi­culty of future pre­dic­tion is cen­tral. Many head­lines you view as noise or minu­tiae today may prove to her­ald or at least con­tex­tu­al­ize an impor­tant future outcome.

    Like it or not, arriv­ing at sig­nal will always involve swim­ming in noise.

  • http://www.ivanandersson.com/ Ivan Ander­s­son

    Great stuff. I’m also a fan of Tech­meme and its news flow. But your results only con­firmed what I ear­lier only have felt. The flow is many times as a lot of curls on the sur­face. All infor­ma­tion com­bined though, it prob­a­bly con­tribute to the big­ger pic­ture of things.

  • http://kyle.mathews2000.com/ Kyle Math­ews

    Re: “I’ve long hoped for a ver­sion of Tech­Meme that would pro­vide me with a cus­tomized view that pro­vid­ing a sim­i­lar user inter­face for my own per­sonal feeds.”

    This is com­ing. I’m a Google Sum­mer of Code stu­dent build­ing an open-source meme­tracker. Fol­low the progress here:
    http://groups.drupal.org/memetracker

    And read my orig­i­nal pro­posal here:
    http://kyle.mathews2000.com/blog/2008/04/04/drupal-memetracker-module-my-google-summer-of-code-application

    One other thought. I for one would love a slower mov­ing tech­meme that pro­vided per­haps a 3–4 day view of tech news and that trimmed out the less impor­tant discussion/related posts. The larger times­lot from which news is drawn would ensure the memes cov­ered are less “myopic” and pro­vide a use­ful view to those visit tech­meme less obses­sively than some of us.

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  • http://www.daviddalka.com/createvalue/ David Dalka

    Say what you will about some things like cer­tain voices are a bit louder than oth­ers (and might be due for a hair­cut) or there isn’t enough thought leader posts — Tech­meme is still the one place I can go and in less than 60 sec­onds get a view of Tech news of the day if I’ve been under a rock or in a hard place.

    I appre­ci­ate the ser­vice greatly. Keep up the good work Gabe!

  • http://www.tnl.net/blog/ Tris­tan Louis

    BTW, every­one, there’s more con­ver­sa­tion relat­ing to this on Friend­Feed (shame I can’t find a way to inte­grate all of them)

    Gabe: True, the ques­tion is the level of noise. I’d love to see sug­ges­tions for how we could help improve rel­e­vancy. I fully appre­ci­ate the value of the vol­ume but I think Tech­Meme really shines when there’s a major event and it orga­nizes the whole con­ver­sa­tion around that event as a pack­age. I dont’ know but there may be a need for higher thresh­olds for stuff to make it there so we can get a full under­stand­ing of an event (for exam­ple, I can think of the day Microsoft announced its intent to acquire Yahoo, no other news site pro­vided as com­plete a pack­age of news and analy­sis as tech­meme did). I’d just love to have the page work that way ALL the time…

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  • http://spap-oop.blogspot.com Tish Grier

    Tris­tan: from the com­mu­nity and site related work I’m doing with Placeblogger.com, I’d have to say that it is only sec­tors of the blogsophere–not the blo­gos­phere as a whole–that is myopic. Tech blog­gers, sim­i­lar to polit­i­cal blog­gers, are a par­tic­u­larly obses­sive bunch. But, then again, their obses­sive­ness cre­ates atten­tion which then cre­ates com­mu­nity, which may be cause for part of the obses­sive­ness (not the con­tent.) Other the­o­ries for the obses­sive­ness of some tech blog­gers might be psy­cho­log­i­cal fall­out from the dot com era; or, as for Om, etc, obses­sive­ness could have some­thing to do with the dif­fi­culty in reach­ing that crit­i­cal mass of click throughs that trans­lates into decent income. Out­side of Tech­meme, or other spe­cialty blog­ging groups, I think you may be hard pressed to find the same level of extended obses­sive­ness over minutia.

  • gre­gory

    gabe, if you read this … i have been notic­ing i never look at your adver­tiser news sto­rys, the one’e high­lighted in gray, because of the high­light, which seems like a dis­ser­vice to them .… i imag­ine you don’t want to con­fuse ad with edi­to­r­ial, but maybe a dif­fer­ent color?

  • http://www.tnl.net/blog/ Tris­tan Louis

    Tish: an inter­est­ing obser­va­tion. What do you think make that obses­sive­ness unique to the tech com­mu­nity? I’d ven­ture that it also exist in pol­i­tics and would exist in most other areas but I don’t have the data to prove it either way…