Disqus - Friends of MahendraP

Re: Techmeme: A Flawed System

GabeRivera — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 17:53:08 -0000

Corvida: Hi, you seem new here. Welcome to the tech blogosphere, where Techmeme deals daily disappointment to all bloggers.

Automated news aggregation that's compelling to readers, fair to publishers, and works at all in the first place, is really hard to accomplish. Most of my life is just finding what Techmeme does wrong, and figuring out how to avoid that in the future. Techmeme is wrong all the time, and my work will never be complete.

I'd like to offer reassuring words, but looking at this particular event, I don't think Techmeme will be able to attribute things as you desire in any reasonable time frame. Existing software can't perform the kinds of reasoning you want with acceptable accuracy.

The (only) good news is that efforts you and other bloggers are taking to promote each other should help, since maybe that way bloggers will spot interesting things earlier.

Re: What does an algorithm think? (Scripting News)

GabeRivera — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 23:23:59 -0000

So Dave, the way you framed it, Techmeme has to somehow make Arrington NOT #1, otherwise it's fishy. I'll take my Techmeme fishy then. People like Arrington's posts (TC is #1 on Technorati too); until tech bloggers link to someone else more, he'll probably stay at #1, sorry!

Re: What does an algorithm think? (Scripting News)

GabeRivera — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 23:45:25 -0000

Conflicts? Oh Dave, let me tell you, I've got conflicts. I'm pretty good friends with a number of people on that list. I could go on and on. Let me start with Dave Winer.

I've known Dave Winer since 2005. Had a number of meals with him. In fact, Dave introduced me to Jing Jing's Dan Dan noodles, which I came to love so much I now make them at home. Since then, Dave's blog has linked to Techmeme many times, and Techmeme has reciprocated. It's just so darned conflicted, I don't know what to do!

Re: Dave - you are a pompous ass

GabeRivera — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 18:48:53 -0000

Dave: nice job! How about a few more enumerated points? You know, a #6, #7, #8... You're so close to a breakthrough, I can sense it!

Re: Cramer on TechMeme…Oy!

GabeRivera — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 04:42:54 -0000

It seems Techmeme can't resist anyone floating new Apple rumors!

Re: Aggregation Wins - Not So Fast

GabeRivera — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 22:47:05 -0000

Hey Fred, two comments here:

First, TechCrunch is indeed more trafficked that Techmeme. I believe Techmeme's readership, while larger than most tech blogs, is still smaller than sites like TechCrunch, Engadget, and Slashdot. There are alot of good reasons for this to be true, which I'll skip here!

Second, Techmeme always looks terrible on Compete, Alexa, etc because Techmeme's SEO is terrible. Most content sites, over the course of the month, gather far more one-time searchers than actual readers. For these sites, Compete is a reflection of their search footprint on the internet population. Techmeme doesn't enjoy many Google hits, so Compete's data is more a reflection of its actual daily readership. (Maybe I should just get Techmeme to spam Google so I don't have to keep apologizing like this...).

Re: Aggregation Wins - Not So Fast

GabeRivera — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 23:43:22 -0000

Rick, in my comment, I said TechCrunch is more trafficked than Techmeme, so obviously I'm not blaming the gap on just SEO. That said, I'm affirming that an active readership is something very meaningful, especially for a news site. I'm not "dismissing" other measurable things, but you can bet I'll emphasize active readership, because that's what I'm gunning for with Techmeme.

Re: Overlooked detail? (Scripting News)

GabeRivera — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:41:17 -0000

That might be useful. Imagine one for FriendFeed as well. That way you could find someone's Twitter / Flickr / Disqus / etc through their blog. Though FriendFeed isn't putting this data in "structured" form, it's definitely scrapable today.

Re: Overlooked detail? (Scripting News)

GabeRivera — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:16:16 -0000

Ah, so "rel-me" is something FriendFeed could use even today for all the links under the "Services" heading (e.g. http://friendfeed.com/facto... )

Re: Overlooked detail? (Scripting News)

GabeRivera — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:41:59 -0000

Ah, swell. More on DiSo here: http://www.techmeme.com/071... :-)

Re: Friendfeed versus Techmeme: can’t they just get along?

GabeRivera — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 21:13:11 -0000

To me the interesting question is why people make the comparison at all. I think it's because there will always be people to sit and sift through services like Twitter and FriendFeed all day, who love the "noise" and aren't easily overwhelmed. To them, Twitter/FF reports news "before" Techmeme, so they're "better". A similar argument can be made for using Google Reader with 500 subscriptions.

Obviously most people don't collect news that way most of the time. In fact, even the ones who do generally still use Techmeme anyway.

Re: Friendfeed versus Techmeme: can’t they just get along?

GabeRivera — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 21:21:00 -0000

Louis, I set up a Techmeme bot in fact before turning off its updates. The old updates are here: http://friendfeed.com/techmeme

I turned off updates because the results would overwhelm the FriendFeed search results for "Techmeme". Yes, I'm aware that's a bit selfish of me!

FriendFeed still doesn't offer a way to search "everyone" while excluding certain users, to my knowledge. If they ever do, I'll turn updates back on, since I'll then be able to search for "Techmeme" without results from the Techmeme account appearing.

Re: Data flow and creating electricity

GabeRivera — Sun, 25 May 2008 16:17:53 -0000

To find out how you arrived at a page in Firefox: get context menu for web page (right click page area in Windows or Ctrl-click on Mac), then "View Page Info" then read "Referring URL".

Re: Techmeme corrects your titles

GabeRivera — Sun, 25 May 2008 23:27:20 -0000

Heh. I like rudeness, but I've found it's a net win to insert those asterisks, as silly as it may seem. BTW, it's automated. A bunch of words will get that treatment.

More here: http://www.mathewingram.com...

And here: http://mashable.com/2007/10...

Re: louisgray.com: Scooped: Who Brought the Story to Techmeme First?

GabeRivera — Mon, 26 May 2008 21:29:07 -0000

Cool. One note: Twitter was initially called "Twttr" and Biz Stone (of Twitter) had the first post: http://techmeme.com/search/...

Re: Search results via RSS now available - Techmeme News

GabeRivera — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 16:18:00 -0000

Thanks Dave. Yep, planning to. No firm plans as to when though. Naturally, there's interest ( http://is.gd/rIy ) in WeSmirch search as well.

Re: Techmeme and "Blogging 2.0"

GabeRivera — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 14:29:51 -0000

It's hard for me to see how automated aggregation of tweets could be a net win for Techmeme.

As others have said, tweets lack context, unlike blog which are much more self contained.

Could tweets be reassembled into something more coherent for Techmeme? Automated processes for doing that are too error prone, at least by the standards Techmeme would demand. And even if they were perfect, the results will still look strange and disjointed. And in any case, blog posts tend to emerge quickly for the most important stories "breaking" on Twitter.

Techmeme has definitely benefited from the Twitter ecosystem. For one thing, Twitter serves as a backchannel that prompts people to blog about things they otherwise would have discovered too late or not at all. Of course Techmeme publishes to Twitter too. But aggregation of the tweets themselves is a tough nut to crack.

Re: Firefox 3 launches in 6 days

GabeRivera — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 23:59:11 -0000

For me, FF3 is all about the intelligent search in the location bar. I'm putting up with crashes because I don't wanna lost the location bar.

Re: AP pay-to-quote, day 2 (Scripting News)

GabeRivera — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 20:10:45 -0000

Dave, we're at year 15 or so of web news, and AP, today, has a form where they're asking us to pay for quotes involving just five words. With their words and deed, the AP is effectively working to stamp out freedoms we know we have. Even after last week's uproar, they actually told the NYT that even short direct quotes were not "appropriate". In light of this, I'm glad some bloggers went "nuclear", even if I didn't do so personally.

Re: BricaBox: Goodbye World!

GabeRivera — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 14:40:51 -0000

Whoa, innonate's on Techmeme again! Good luck in whatever comes next. And save me a Bricabox mug, if you have one.

Re: Sponsored post by Robert Scoble

GabeRivera — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 03:50:25 -0000

Robert, Duncan, the idea that Techmeme is losing influencers to FriendFeed is something you only hear on FriendFeed, usually by people who aren't very influential, and who in fact still read Techmeme. In short, it's a complete farce. Robert, I very much appreciate the support and am pleased Techmeme is introducing your videos to influencers who aren't FriendFeed users.

Re: Sponsored post by Robert Scoble

GabeRivera — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 03:51:36 -0000

Loic, it sounds to me like Seesmic needs to sponsor Techmeme.

Re: When Will A Comment Be Treated Like A Post On Techmeme?

GabeRivera — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 02:02:42 -0000

Yeah, it would be nice to have some comments, including David's, appear on Techmeme somehow. But given the limited expected payoff (examples like the one you describe are rare) and the difficulty involve (people link to comments much less than to posts), supporting that might not move high enough up my priority list to happen as soon as you'd like.

Apologies to David Hornik...

Re: When Will A Comment Be Treated Like A Post On Techmeme?

GabeRivera — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 05:24:19 -0000

Fred: that sounds great. I missed your point about Disqus because I read your post too fast.

Svetlana: I'll take a look. Even if less than 10% are good suggestions in my view, it will be worth the read!

Dave Winer: can I blurbify that excellent quote?

Re: Is it Duncan Riley, or is it Techmeme?

GabeRivera — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 02:27:52 -0000

So I learned of Duncan's odd little war with Mike when he complained (without merit) that TechCrunch interlinking was gaming Techmeme. That gave way to accusations that he'd been banned, which gave way to my favorite so far: that Mike asked me to manually remove one particular link to Duncan's blog, while leaving the rest intact. At that point I knew I was part of the story in Duncan's head, and said as much here http://friendfeed.com/e/2ed... (see "please disregard...").

John: that's the most socially awkward thing I've read all week. If we ever meet again, whoever you are, could you not...study me...so much? Thanks.