Each company listed has its own tagline, apparently written by the companies themselves. Google says “The end to your job search.” Clever. Twitter says “Less characters, more fulfilling.” Not bad. My favorite is from Twilio who asks job searchers to “Come run wild in our geek pasture.” Sounds fun.

Clicking on the company links will take you to their respective jobs page.

In a post on the Techmeme news page, founder Gabe Rivera says “Billboards suck, promote your company’s jobs on Techmeme!”  He writes further that  “Techmeme is a better place for companies to reach out to a smart and well-informed tech-focused audience…We expect that Techmeme readers who are inclined to upgrade their jobs, or ready to embark on a career in tech, will take this jobs section as an extra nudge to explore options available at the featured companies, and a reminder that all of the great companies listed are aggressively hiring.”

How will this affect Techmeme’s news aggregation?  Will they give more weight to stories from and about the companies that buy job promotion spots?  No, Rivera says to TechCrunch.

“Not more than any other news site that accepts advertising from an array of companies. The only time I mentioned consideration of sponsors to my editorial staff was when I asked them specifically not to give sponsors extra consideration,” he says.

The tweets Techmeme will now link to fall mainly into two categories. First is the news-breaking variety, which directly offer new factual information, whether a straight-up product announcement (example), a new "rumor" report (example, via), a statement containing a veiled announcement (example), or a kind of inadvertently newsworthy announcement (example, via). Tweets of this sort, if interesting enough, will receive fullTechmeme headlines of their own.

The second type is commentary: reactions, responses, rebuttals, endorsements, or amplifications to news stories. Exceptional tweets of this sort may occasionally receive headlines, but more commonly will show up in Discussion, the smaller headlines collapsed by default on Techmeme. Even a tweet simply intended to share a link, if paired with incisive commentary, could show up on Techmeme.

Original Article: Technology aggregation site Techmeme is now accepting tweets as the basis for stories. Founder Gabe Rivera tweeted as much, which is of course the first tweet to take advantage. 

In many ways, the move makes a lot of sense, as tweets are widely seen as sources of breaking news (often from the sources themselves). Much of the coverage often linked to from Techmeme points to tweets anyway, so this strategy ought to cut out the middle man in many cases. 

The first response tweet to Rivera’s tweet that’s been listed in the conversation on Techmeme declares blogging to be officially dead, but tweeting has always been microblogging, so there’s not really a whole lot of difference in terms of what should be getting on Techmeme. It’s just that a lot of the posts will be a lot shorter, and I don’t anticipate they’ll be throwing out long-form blog posts anytime soon. 

It will not be surprising to see the site follow tweet acceptance with the acceptance of upates from other services like Facebook, , Google Buzz, etc. News can break on any of these things (and others).  They’ve already used Quora posts, as Rivera points out in the blog post mentioned in the update. 

One big advantage of the tweet is the quickness. It takes far less time to tweet than to write an entire blog post, or even take a screenshot of another tweet, so I can see this leading to news getting on TechMeme faster as well.

Techmeme founder and owner Gabe Rivera shared some info with Jay Yarow and Kamelia Angelova earlier today, and it turns out that a changeup occurred in September.  About 34 percent of people visiting Techmeme pages now do so using Chrome.

Firefox is four percentage points behind with a share of 30 percent.  Also, Safari has a market share of 21 percent, while Internet Explorer has a market share of 12 percent, if you’re curious.

Then contenders like Opera, Opera Mini, SeaMonkey, and Camino all have shares that just round to zero or one percent.

Anyway, this is less than good news for the folks at Mozilla, since one of Firefox’s key strengths has long been its popularity among techie types.  If they’re now making the switch to Chrome, and the general public’s still content with IE, Firefox could be left in a sort of no-man’s land.

Mozilla fans should cross their fingers that Firefox 4 blows everybody away.

Well put.

The fact of the matter is, the site is Rivera’s to do anything he pleases. He doesn’t have to please bloggers and other content producers who are unhappy with the changes. He’s making an effort to make the site better, and that is for the readers. By turning to a human-edited approach, Techmeme is:

- Avoiding obsolete news

– Improving "related" grouping

– making it easier to post "breaking" news stories

Rivera discusses all of this in his announcement of the changes. He writes:

In 2005 it was clear to me that an ideal news aggregation site would need to combine automation with direct, hands on editing. In a rare departure from my usual reticence, I even stated in comments to a blog post "I’m planning extensions to my system to enable a hybrid man+memeorandum." This "planning" turned out to be rather long term, since we made no major headway on this idea until 2008.

Early on, when our system was less technically refined, the clearest path toward improvement involved simply iterating algorithmic development. Later, as the automation reached a certain degree of maturity, we recognized that direct editing could now improve news results by leaps and bounds. Though our roadmap contains a number of novel future algorithmic enhancements, introducing editing now appears to be a no-brainer.

The person in charge of editing Techmeme is the recently hired Megan McCarthy who has worked for Valleywag and Wired in the past (Valleywag has a post about her "greatest hits"). Although Rivera says that Omer Horvitz and himself will also share some of the editorial tasks.

Now we can sit back and see if Techmeme actually improves because of these changes. If you’ve got problems with how Techmeme handles content from now on, Rivera encourages you to let McCarthy know.

What happened? Well, you can see the headlines over on TechMeme. Twitter blamed its “popular” users for its woes. Now, who could that be? Right. Venture Beat filled in the blank, if you just weren’t sure.

A business that blames its best users is one that’s in trouble. Serious trouble.

It’s so sad to watch a business make so many bad decisions like this one is doing. Right now a pretty significant part of Twitter is down. Track isn’t on. IM isn’t on. Other parts of the service are giving me tons of whale photos that say something is technically wrong. It’s so sad because I really want to use this service to keep in touch with my friends and fans and family and enemies and all that. They all were on Twitter. Now? On FriendFeed alone I now have 11,566 followers (a large percentage of which joined in past two weeks). There is a migration underway, although most people say “I really want to be on Twitter” even after trying out competitive services like Pownce, FriendFeed, and Jaiku.

Please Twitter: fix your darn problems and stop blaming your users. You now have $15,000,000 in venture. You have no excuses anymore.

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The job posted at JournalismJobs.com was for an editor’s position at a to-be-created women’s lifestyle website and had a nice, jazzy job description about being able to "explain why Renee Zellweger is endearing yet freaky, and Amy Sedaris is freaky yet brilliant."

The company isn’t mentioned.

I looked at it, a lot, trying to find a mention of the company. At the bottom, applicants are instructed to respond to a person whose email ends in @aol.com, an address only a few million people could have.

So, not only do I still not know which company is hiring for this position, I still don’t know why it’s showing up on TechMeme. Surely, we’re not going to see every online job posting there, are we?

A refresh later and the link disappears—so I’m guessing the answer to the last question is no—and is replaced with a Media Post story saying AOL was planning to launch a site targeted toward young women. While AOL declined to comment, there was the evidence of it at the job posting at JournalismJobs.com.

So I looked again. Nope. No mention of a company. But Silicon Alley Insider was pretty convinced according to its posting. PaidContent made me feel better by noting the company wasn’t mentioned, and confirmed with Time Warner that the company was planning to launch a complement to the men’s site Asylum.

But there’s no mention of confirmation that the particular job posting was for an AOL project, and AOL still wouldn’t comment on rumors.

I looked again at the job posting, just to make sure I wasn’t missing something. Nope, just the AOL email address at the bottom. Surely, that wasn’t evidence, right? I looked back at Media Post’s story. Pretty much what I remembered: AOL won’t comment, but there’s a job posting, and Bill Wilson told Bloomberg there’d be more sites this year.

Perhaps Media Post is holding back some sources that weren’t presented. I emailed the person listed at the bottom of the job posting, who didn’t respond to confirm or deny.

Then again, AOL already said they weren’t commenting on it.

I’d have posted this sooner, but that darn journalistic skepticism gets in the way sometimes.
 

Gabe at SXSW
(Photo Credit: SXSW)

So this is kind of like the reader mail response segment. Before you begin, if you haven’t already, read this, where I criticize giving TechCrunch a position above not just highly-authoritative sources (that doesn’t bother me as much, vive la revolution) but also above original sources.

In the comments section, someone appearing to be TechMeme founder Gabe Rivera responded:
 

You got me thinking…
 

Techmeme is 93% TechCrunch-free, despite TC’s thought leadership and #1 spot on the Technorati 100. Maybe 7% presence is too low. Thanks for the post!

Technically, I could contact Gabe to confirm that comment, or do an IP trace, but it doesn’t matter for our purposes. I’ll concede it could or could not be him since the point is what is more important for the conversation. From here to the end of this response we’ll think of the commentator as "AssumedlyGabe."

Chris Shipley, writing for The Guidewire—I’ve heard of him, for full disclosure of my egomaniacal ways, via Google News alert for my pen name, which led me to his blog—takes a similar point of view:

But with due respect, I think Jason misses the point so obvious when reviewing the leaderboards’ Top 100 sources.

There’s no questioning TechCrunch’s popularity, but with just a 7% presence among the many links TechMeme mines and promotes, it can hardly claim total world domination. Nor can any of the other blogs that make the leaderboard’s Top 100.

The leaderboard, in fact, is a perfect illustration of the Long Tail…. Whatever you think about TechMeme’s algorithm, fact is that the site is discovering links from sources that’d the average reader wouldn’t have time to investigate on his own.

Point taken on how useful TechMeme is when it comes to presenting a wealth of sources that pop up in the conversation, especially those that might otherwise go unheard.

I commented on Chris’s post, a comment I will reproduce here to reinforce my original point:

Hi Chris. I’m happy you thought my thought-piece on TechMeme was worth a mention. Thank you for participating in the greater conversation.
 

Gabe Rivera (who, at least, appears to be Gabe Rivera–you never can be sure in comments, can you?) had an opinion similar to yours. He phrased it as, basically, “TechMeme is 93% TechCrunch Free,” which is certainly true, and then went on to opine that since TechCrunch was the #1 blog on Technorati’s Top 100, maybe he should weight the blog *more* heavily.
 

Looks like I struck a nerve. That’s okay. It’s my job to do so as a conversation leader.
 

It’s important to remember that statistics are often up to interpretation, as is most of the human experience. When you compare TechCrunch’s 7% to USA Today’s 0.18%, you could also rearrange the number to mean TechMeme is 99.82% USA Today free, ranked 98, just above Steve Rubel’s MicroPersuasion.
 

And that’s Gabe’s preogative [sic] to weight the sources as he feels is just. It’s his site. (It’s hard to ignore sometimes, though, reports that he and Arrington are pretty tight.)
 

All that aside, the point I was trying to make was not that TechMeme is 93% TechCrunch free, which is similar to your point, but (mostly) that TechCrunch’s regurgitative posts–where TechCrunch bloggers report what the subject of the blog post has already posted on his own blog–should not receive billing over those original sources.
 

It’s like crediting Thomas Edison for what a French guy did first.
 

That doesn’t take away TechCrunch’s right to report what’s going on or link to whom they please in any voice or fashion they see fit, but it should be something on the mind of a man running a (currently) very important news/blog aggregation site.
 

Cheers, and thanks for reading.
 

Really, that I would be so concerned about TechMeme and source-weighting is a testament to its strength, necessity, relevance, and validity in that great big world of aggregators. Writing about something—even if critical—is a compliment. At least, that’s how I take it when others write about me. Being wrong is much better than being ignored, right?

Faithful readers, what do you think?
 

TechCrunch, presumably on the credible weight of Michael Arrington, accounts for seven percent of the topics sprouting up on TechMeme, a number that, at a glance, would seem low on any given day. That seven percent trumps information from CNET, The New York Times, and Reuters, which is way down at number twelve, which tells you how site-creator Gabe Rivera feels about Reuters.

Robert Scoble has a lengthy video explanation of how TechMeme works, how to game it, and how TechCrunch will appear at the top even without anybody linking to it. If you have 36 minutes, give it a shot. At the beginning of the first video (yes, the first video, because he’s interrupted by a crying baby, something nobody’s going to fault him for), Scoble "reverse engineers" TechMeme to find that Rivera has weighted Arrington’s blog disproportionately because Arrington is the go-to guy in Silicon Valley.

And that makes TechCrunch, according to Scoble and maybe Rivera, a more credible source than the aforementioned news heavyweights, and yes, dear readers, more than even WebProNews, which at one time was sixty-something, a little above where the Washington Post is now, but has since fallen to 83, relegated to the company of comScore, but still beating the crap out of Fortune, ZDNet, and USA Today.

But we shouldn’t focus on who is above whom; all that compare-and-dispair stuff is unhealthy. WebProNews nor I need all that external validation anyway, we’ll just go on strolling through the soft fields hedging our delusions of grandeur and be happy with what Whitney Houston once referred to as The Greatest Love Of All. It’ll have to do until Bobby shows up with the pipe.

This isn’t a slam at TechCrunch, either, which is a good source of insider-y information, so good that the New York Times’ TechMeme-alternative, Blogrunner, gives it its due among the papers of record as well, despite how often those Silicon Valley rumors turn out to be cry-wolf look-at-me parties. Now if only Blogrunner could be faster and a bit more inclusive (there’s a lot more human editing going on at Blogrunner than TechMeme), there might be a better site for keeping up with the real-time explosive conversations peppering the blogosphere at any given moment, and we wouldn’t have to look at TechMeme and sigh, "Duncan Riley again?"

Not that it’s always a bad thing. It was kind of fun on March 14th, at least.

But today’s snapshot just seemed silly, even if not uncommon. Today Mike Butcher at TechCrunchUK gets top-billing for reporting British newspaper The Guardian had hired Yahoo developer Matt McAlister. In a related story, Matt McAlister blogs about his new gig at The Guardian. Just below that topic, Riley relates news of Chris Pirillo’s new community CMS project. Discussion of the topic can be found at Pirillo’s blog, where he also talks about his new community CMS project.

Kind of reminiscent of the time Fred Wilson "lit a fire" and Arrington got to tell everyone about it.

Far be it from anybody to tell Rivera how he should weight the sources that appear on his site. That’s up to him and according to whatever contract he’s worked out with Arrington*. But it does seem kind of crappy some of these bloggers don’t get to tell their own stories because TechCrunch has a louder microphone.  
 
_{*That was said in jest. We have no evidence of backroom (or living room) dealings.} 
 
 

The Good Ship Blogosphere foundered against the rocky shores of the island of Capital, as far as we can tell. If Piggy’s not dead already, someone’s groping for a rock, a decent grip, and the right angle for the killing blow.

Remember, the rising blogosphere offered the prospect of something better than all the tech journals in print. Real-time access to breaking information, along with the kind of commentary one couldn’t possibly find in the ad-dominated trade mags, existed as the currency of the blog realm.

Then some folks woke up one morning and realized currency, real Gulfstream-flying, Kobe steak-eating cash money where lots of zeroes parade behind an inconsequential digit, dangled within reach. And as human nature is wont to do, some of the hands that reach turned into fists that kill.

Witness the last 24 hours of the blogs, highlighted on tracking site Techmeme. Michael Arrington wants to crush CNET, which seems to be doing a good job of that itself, as Arrington wrote in TechCrunch.

Kara Swisher at BoomTown snarked away at that idea. She even used showtunes to do it.

“Could it have something to do with the fact that he

 I can’t see this yet, but according to the help page Google provides:

• You can move up any individual search result by clicking an up arrow icon next to it
• You can hide any result by clicking an X button next to it
• You can suggest missing URLs which you think are more relevant to your search query

Now, whenever you search again – and are logged-in to your Google Account – your changes will remain visible. An orange star icon disclaims those results which were amended by you. If you like you can also reset them, though.

Google does not mention whether or not your changes might influence the results of others, but if this experiment ever becomes heavily deployed, there might well be a chance Google at least considers it; if so, then it would allow direct voting on search results with an instrument other than just linking to the page from a website. And if so, potential for abuse will be there, too… or as Jessamyn on Flickr commented: “Finally another job for out of work gold farmers.”

[Hat tip to Haochi and Techmeme! Screenshot CC-licensed by Jessamyn.]

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