Comments on: Is Techmeme myopic?

By: My del.icio.us bookmarks for June 4th | AccMan

My del.icio.us bookmarks for June 4th | AccMan — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 05:36:47 +0000

[...] Is Techmeme myopic? – An excellent set of observations marred only by the fact that the writer didn't observe the extent to which a handful of companies seem to dominate the noise levels represented by Techmeme. Therer really is more to life than Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! t [...]

By: Tristan Louis

Tristan Louis — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 04:10:46 +0000

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…

By: gregory

gregory — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 02:00:58 +0000

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?

By: Tish Grier

Tish Grier — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 01:25:22 +0000

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.

By: Link Sharing: 6/3/08 » Webomatica - Technology and Entertainment Digest

Link Sharing: 6/3/08 » Webomatica - Technology and Entertainment Digest — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 00:13:00 +0000

[...] Social Media Is Timely, Get Over It: Alexander van Elsas encourages us tech bloggers to step out of the constant info-flow and relax. Related: There is always something new on Techmeme. [...]

By: Tristan Louis

Tristan Louis — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 21:34:28 +0000

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…

By: David Dalka

David Dalka — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 20:48:06 +0000

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!

By: Aggregators Are Around Us, Will Proliferate

Aggregators Are Around Us, Will Proliferate — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 20:26:45 +0000

[...] course Techmeme has its problems. Tristan Louis wrote about Techmeme myopia – Techmeme highlights stories that are being discussed right now, but it cannot distinguish between [...]

By: Kyle Mathews

Kyle Mathews — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 19:20:59 +0000

Re: “Iâ€™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.

By: Ivan Andersson

Ivan Andersson — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 19:12:12 +0000

Great stuff. Iâ€™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.