Last time I checked, Al Gore was charging $175,000 for a speech.

I appreciate your tireless work Atul.

Tom - you are right - I shouldn't be so pedantic about it. Gabe seems to online 24x7 so one could also argue he counts for more than one person. And thanks for you flattering comments about me in the article. Cheers.

Personally, I think we're moments away from a paradigm shift in how we rank and filter the web.

Integration of social media annotation data into search algorithms will effectively turn every one of us into an editor of the web. Eliminating the the need for manual tweaks and human editors.

Definitely agree, always good to see these studies and they also seem to be getting more sophisticated/insightful which is positive. Your point about the middle management layer is an interesting one. Could certainly see how that would make sense. Thanks for the post, it inspired a post over on our blog and some conversation here.

Joseph, Text 100

Marshall: Yes, you are right, PageRank is a human-aided system but the harvesting of that knowledge was done by machine, but is this is no loger good enough and requires direct supervision by humans? That seems to be what's happening...

Thanks Atul. Gabe said that he and Omer are engaged in editorial duties so it still adds up to 6 but I take your point about them not doing it full time. But I guess this also means that Techmeme more than doubled their editors...

Tom - A small correction. I believe the # of editors is 4 (or 4.5 depends if you count Gabe is an editor or tweaks the algorithm) and not 6. I believe Megan was the first editor back in Dec 2008 and then Techmeme announced the addition of three more yesterday

In many ways Google is a human-aided algorithm as well.

PageRank leverages human editorial decisions by measuring linking patterns between sites.

Similarly the Hilltop algorithm, developed by Krishna Bharat creator of Google News, uses a list of expert documents to refine search rankings.

Clearly there's no shame in using human intelligence to refine search results. I suppose the real trick is using others' human intelligence instead of hiring your own.

Ian: I agree that human editors can make Techmeme better. But it won't neccesarily help list other blogs because Techmeme monitors a core set of blogs/news sites and if you are not in it your chances of being mentioned are slim. You make a good point about what happens when they go home for the night - I guess the machine takes over...

I think human editors can improve quality and help frustrated editors (myself included) complaining about why their blogs aren't making it onto TM, but I am curious to see how Techmeme's new setup can be optimized for speedy updates when humans take a lunch break or sign off for the night. That was one area in which the old Techmeme setup and the current Google News setup have excelled.

I'm not surprised the results of this study reflect the growing influence of social media. What's more interesting, in my opinion, is what seems to be a more fundamental shift toward collaborative decision-making in professional environments. Certainly social media facilitates that but it strikes me as a deeper shift than technology and communication tools.

Yeah. And, too bad for everyone, because there is enough room to increase the pie, we call www, and thus earn more money, instead of trying to carve out as big a piece of it as possible, often at the expense of others.

The latter strategy also brings money, but it is so shortsighted.

Greg, well said. Google has painted itself into a corner and has far fewer options than Murdoch. And it will never get into content creation because that's not its business. Yahoo has tried several times to get into content creation and failed. Silicon Valley companies are server and software based because that's a scalable business. People based companies such as the New York Times have no interest to a Google...

I totally agree. I think it is a disgrace that Silicon Valley's public schools are often basket cases when they should be showcases. We can't go around saying to the world "we are inventing the future" yet our own communities are so poorly educated and our schools so poorly funded. I'm fed up of super star Silicon Valley CEOs flying to Washington D.C to complain about education yet they won't walk down the street to their local school and help in their communities.

I cannot say what Mr Murdoch is planning to do, but I agree that he has a lot stronger hand now than the search engines ever will. Unless, of course, they start creating their own and/or buy 3rd party content, which is unlikely -- that would be against their current business model.

More importantly, Murdoch has one more ace in his deck -- he can buy Yahoo (as he has already tried, I think), and turn it into a premium content SE!