techmeme

Sites that help you find hot topics across the Web

The Web is a great place to learn about hot topics, but Internet memes can't be spotted so easily unless you have some help. On topics ranging from tech to general interest, you can find what's hot at any moment with the following resources.

Find your memes

Blogrunner The New York Times' Blogrunner sifts through all the news hitting blogs across the Web, finds the hot topics, and lists them on the site. The most popular stories at the time are listed at the top of the Blogrunner page. Those that are either older or on their way up are listed below the top stories.

I was happy with the amount of content Blogrunner provides. Unlike some sites that focus solely on one topic, Blogrunner lists politics, world news, tech news, religion, and several other topics to find the hot stories in each category. Sifting through the stories is simple. And thanks to a fine design, you should be happy with the experience. It's not the best tool in this roundup, but it's pretty good.

BuzzFeed BuzzFeed is a user-generated topic finder. The site asks its users to find funny, outrageous, or interesting content across the Web that appeals to a wider audience. The topics they find should have the goal of starting a meme on the Web.

BuzzFeed is filled with funny or outrageous videos and images. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but if you're trying to find the hottest news at any moment, you probably won't have much luck with BuzzFeed. If you're just looking for some entertainment, you might like BuzzFeed. Your mileage will vary.… Read more

Techmeme founder: WSJ, NYT are aggregators

Updated at 3:40 p.m. PDT to include Wall Street Journal's deals for some of the news that it aggregates.

Techmeme is one of the sites that Robert Thomson, managing editor of the The Wall Street Journal, presumably thinks is a "parasite" or "tech tapeworm in the intestines of the Internet."

The Web site aggregates links to stories. Along with the links is a short description of the news. Thomson and others in the newspaper industry say it's unfair and unlawful for Web sites to profit from their content without compensating them. On … Read more

On the record: New overseer for Techmeme robots

The algorithmically generated tech news aggregator Techmeme now has a human editor, Techmeme founder and developer Gabe Rivera revealed in a blog post today. The new overload to the Techmeme robots: Megan McCarthy, formerly of Valleywag and Wired.com.

I talked with McCarthy about her new role. She describes her job as, "really, just to see all the things coming in, to make sure everything is current and relevant." The site posts about 140 to 150 items a day, she said. Her role is to make sure that erroneous items that the Techmeme algorithm flags aren't posted, … Read more

Google News dips into meme tracking for blogs

Early Wednesday, Google updated its blog search tool to track news stories as they pop up on various blogs. Like Google News, the company is taking a product that began as something for search and making it a destination of its own.

What's different in blog search compared with news is that the front page shows how many outlets wrote about a story and how old in a very different manner. In blog search's case the number of sources is given a far higher prominence, and instead of tracking how fresh a story is, Google has chosen to … Read more

OneSpot feeds publishers' content

If you don't have content to populate your site, OneSpot has some for you. The Austin-based start-up joins a host of other companies in the business of delivering contextual links for publishers. OneSpot CEO Matt Cohen makes the claim that OneSpot "democratizes vertical or affinity publishing, helping anyone find, select, and deliver links to the best content on the Web."

OneSpot sifts through more than 200,000 RSS feeds to make content selections. Users provide the system with a set of sample sites, and OneSpot identifies related feeds, looking at link overlaps, Cohen told me. The selected … Read more

Filtering the feed

Techmeme has added a missing piece of functionality to its search feature--RSS. Now users can subscribe to results for any query and have them show up in widgets and RSS readers.

Not exactly a super newsworthy event, but increasingly news aggregation and filtering services, including Techmeme, Digg, Reddit, Blogrunner and a host of others, are filling in the gap between the overflow of content from the thousands of sources and RSS readers. Some RSS readers, such as NewsGator, are adding collaborative filtering to surface recommended stories. FriendFeed is adding a summarization feature to filter content. Twitter has a tracking feature … Read more

Search arrives on Techmeme

My favorite tech news "aggrefilter" Techmeme finally added a search function. It provides search results in reverse chronological order, but only for items that have appeared as full headlines on Techmeme.

Techmeme creator Gabe Rivera explains the new search function, which was developed by Omer Horvitz:

There are two overall modes of searching, depending on how "close" a result is desired. The default mode only returns matches occurring in the title or the first couple of sentences. Searching for "Yahoo" in this mode typically return stories about Yahoo. Unchecking "Search title & summary … Read more

Twitlinks tracks hot tech news using Twitter

If you're familiar with Techmeme, Tailrank, and other services that track content trends on the Web, you should bookmark a new service called Twitlinks. It uses a hand-picked selection of technology personalities on Twitter and compiles their tweets into a news feed. If there are news links or stories that come out of those tweets, they'll end up on the front page, in a reverse chronological view mere minutes after they're posted.

The list of tweet sources is made public, and currently comes in at just fewer than 100 bloggers, entrepreneurs, and personalities including my boss Rafe, … Read more

The 10 things you may complain about (and five you may not)

In baseball, everyone loves to complain about the Yankees. Unless they're from New York. Here in San Francisco, everyone complains about the cost of living and the bad schools. These are safe complaints, and it's fun to preach to the choir.

The blogosphere also has its approved pinatas. Beef about patent trolls, Vista, or the RIAA, and the current in the Techmeme river will pull you along. Me-too posts will pop up and link to you. You'll feel good. You'll be important.

So in the spirit of sharing (and Techmeme baiting), Webware.com has compiled a … Read more