techmeme

Apple rumors run wild, slow news day confirmed

When it comes to writing about Apple, deciding what you should and should not cover can be tricky.

You can take the machine gun approach: Anything said, written, rumored, or signaled via smoke should be dutifully blogged with a hint of snark and just enough insight to make readers think, "Heeeeeeey, that fella must know the inside dope." This, unfortunately, is what most of the tech press (mea culpa: sometimes including CNET) following Apple does these days. If you don't give readers their Apple fix, the other guys will.

Then there's the high-end approach: you have … Read more

Newspond takes a shot at Digg and Techmeme

Mashable is writing about a new news site called Newspond. Their "about" page boasts that the site is "the most advanced news site on the planet." That's certainly a big statement to make, given the competition that already exists. Its main function is similar to that of Techmeme, with some of the social features of Digg thrown in for good measure.

At first glance, it appears that the content that is floating to the top of Newspond is very different to what is atop Techmeme right now. It's not clear whether this is due … Read more

Powncememe tracks hot Pownce activity for eye candy analysis

One thing Pownce is still missing after opening up earlier this week is a public feed. While the creators have hand-picked a selection of mostly San Francisco socialites for everyone to view on its main page, there's not a simple way to pull together some of the hottest activity on the site short of tapping into the API. An enterprising developer Bryan Pearson has done just that, creating Powncememe, a site that rates people's Pownce messages based on various characteristics including user ratings, the number of recipients, and replies from other users. When combined it's a fun … Read more

ReadBurner turns Google Reader's sharing features into communal bookmarking

A lot of folks would like a memetracker for Google Reader (myself included), and if the big G's not going to provide one, it's up to third-party developers to attempt to build their own. One of the results has been ReadBurner, a service that tries to determine what items (not just feeds) are gaining in popularity at any given time based on the number of people sharing them on Google Reader.

Think of it like Del.icio.us, but instead of browser plug-ins or voting from the content originator's site, the system picks up on items automatically--that … Read more

Techmeme video highlights blogosphere pile-on effect

A time-lapse video of the Techmeme front page created by Amit Argawal (see his blog post) shows how bloggers herd around stories. This entertaining video, which covers 50 hours in the life of the Internet--interestingly, the two days surrounding the Scoble Facebook kerfuffle--shows stories popping on and off the front page of the service, and it graphically illustrates how bloggers and other journalists report on items that have just been covered by their peers and competitors.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Each outlet and blog has its own perspective and should serve its readers without worrying too … Read more

Techmeme unveils a new top 100 list

Techmeme is one of my favorite sites on the internet right now. It finds the hottest discussions throughout news sites and blogs and displays them according to the most popular discussions of the moment. Techmeme has become an invaluable resource for me in trying to figure out what stories are getting the most attention.

Today, Techmeme unveiled a new feature that they call the "Techmeme Leaderboard." The leaderboard essentially makes data that Techmeme has had for years available to readers. It lists the top 100 sources for Techmeme stories, ranked by Presence, which is described as, "...the … Read more

Technorati tries to organize the blogosphere

Technorati has announced a new feature called Topics. Topics is basically a "river of news" from selected blogs in Technorati's six major categories: Entertainment, Technology, Politics, Sports, Business and Life. The stories from these blogs scroll down the page as they are written. According to Technorati, the blogs that are included are picked based on a variety of factors, including, "Technorati Authority, frequency of posting, use of relevant tags, links to related subject matter and general topicality."

Other sites that also work to aggregate the hottest stories on the Internet include Gabe Rivera's Techmeme … Read more

News roundup: Google, Congoo, RateItAll + MuseStorm, Mashtracker

Google rolls out pay-per-action. Google's got a new advertising scheme, and it's set up to help small-time advertisers avoid the dangers of click fraud. Instead of just paying by the click, advertisers can set up predetermined actions the user must go through, such as purchasing an item or browsing a certain section of the site. The new system has sparked controversy in the blogosphere as a potential destroyer of smaller affiliate marketing services.

Congoo launches News Portals. Premium news content distributor Congoo ( previous coverage) has rolled out a customizable single-page-aggregation service that pulls stories from user-selected topics. Users … Read more