Human Or Machine - Or How To Get The News Before Techmeme

By Tom Foremski - June 24, 2009

I'm a big fan of Gabe Rivera's Techmeme. Over the past year or so, Techmeme has managed to improve its results by using humans, in addition to its much vaunted algorithm -based approach.

Lately, Techmeme seems to be relying even more on humans by paying attention to Twitter and to Twitter's prolific news tipsters. The most successful of these is Atul Arora. Here is an interview with Mr Arora over at Quick online tips.

Hundreds of people submit tips to Techmeme, but only a few get accepted. And some top techmeme tippers manage to get many tips accepted everyday. Atul Arora or @atul on twitter is one such top Techmeme tipper whose tips are listed several times a day on Techememe, everyday!

This is what works:

- Tip any breaking news about technology, social media, old media, Google, Apple, Twitter etc.

- Tip news/blog articles that are more likely to have a conversation around them e.g. Steve Job’s health issues, new iPhone release, new Android release

- Twitter/Google/Apple are the media darlings nowadays. So news about them is always good to tip

- Articles from WSJ/NYTimes technology section that are potentially of interest to tech folks

The benefits:

Being linked repeatedly on Techmeme has definitely raised my Twitter profile and contributed greatly to the number of folks who follow me on twitter. It has helped me connect up with web luminaries such as Dave Winer, Robert Scoble, Louis Gray and Howard Lindzon. It also means that I need to be a lot more selective in what I send over to Techmeme.

I subscribe to Mr Atul and also I have a permanent search on anybody that use the tip@techmeme keyword. That way I can get to what's hot before Techmeme crunches its algorithm and decides what to include from its tipsters.

So has Twitter short-circuited Techmeme? Maybe. Gabe's algorithm, like Google's, is secret. But his human algorithm (much more valuable, imho) is very public.

If I were Gabe I'd ask my top tipsters to refrain from using Twitter to broadcast their tips. But then where is the benefit to Techmeme's tipsters if they are Twitter invisible?

I look forward to Gabe's solution...

UPDATED: Just moments after publishing, the ever vigilante Mr Arora sent a message (via Twitter of course) that he would post a response in the comments section later this evening.


                   

June 24, 2009 | Permalink | Comment | Category: MediaWatch | Subscribe to SVW

Comments (1)

Tom

I, too, am a big fan of Techmeme. Starting late January, Gabe started accepting tips to Techmeme via twitter. The idea was to tap into the vast TechMeme news readership to contribute stories to Techmeme that were breaking news or were falling through the cracks. I believe most news organization rely on tips from their readers to help them surface stories and that was also Gabe's rationale. See http://news.techmeme.com/090128/twitter-tips.

At this point of time all the tipsters are well meaning folks. On rare occasions, I have seen spammers and affiliate marketers send in bogus tips to Techmeme. So the problem is not so prevalent as the one that affects the Trending topics on Twitter (and I hope it stays that way). Gabe does have checks in place so that the tipping system is not abused. He has already put some limits in terms of restricting the tips to 2 per hour per person, so folks like myself do not abuse the system by automating the tipping process (and believe me it is easy to automate it).

Now Gabe can always ask the tipsters to refrain from using Twitter to broadcast tips. Or he always has the choice to accept tips via DM only. I am not sure if he will go down that path. His algorithm and human curation are complimentary and the combination of the two is hopefully filling the cracks and helping tech news surface faster.

I am grateful that you subscribe to me to getting some of the Tech news. One way to bypass Techmeme as well as news folks le me surface would be to subscribe to all the news organizations on the Techmeme leaderboard. Most of them have twitter accounts. The downside to doing so would be that the volume of news would be overwhelming and you would lose the clustering capability as well as the newspaper like format that Techmeme offers.

Atul


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