DISQUS

Sebastian · 11 months ago

You should take a look at ReadBurner (a Google Reader Shared Items-aggregator). ReadBurner's problem is that there are too little people using it to share their links right now.
If you could get your top 100 bloggers to share their shared items feed with ReadBurner, there's a good chance ReadBurner would be what you're looking for, minus the problem of having to explain the elite factor to people, because it isn't.

http://www.readburner.com/

dave · 11 months ago

As I said in my post, the tech isn't the issue, it's the editorial. I have that software myself -- it's the stuff behind NewsJunk. Doesn't matter. We still need people. Once we have that, we can open up the flow and let anyone publish it who wants to. The more the merrier.

Nick O'Neill · 11 months ago

You say "the tech isn't the issue, it's the editorial" ... are you:
a) Getting tired of listening to the same people?
b) Want to hear from a wider set then the 100 or so influencers on techmeme?
c) Want a whole new set?
d) All the above?

It sounds like you are just getting bored with the content and want more diversity ... this could me that:
a) you have too much time on your hands and have read everything,
b) don't want to take the time to read your RSS feed reader and other sites (digg, delicious, etc), or
c) want a diverse amount of information in a little amount of time ... I would guess that this means your content consumption rate is not high enough (which I doubt)

Perhaps you could follow more people via Google reader or have an algorithm for finding the most interesting people via Twitter?

Nick O'Neill · 11 months ago

Was my last comment really inappropriate?

Michael Biven · 11 months ago

What you described in point 3 sounds like what I have been using for most of my adult life, a team of editors and writers that I follow and trust, that isn't bogged down by spam and works on finding the balance you are talking about. I'm referring to newspapers and this is exactly one of the things I fear that will become diminished while the newspapers struggle to adapt.

dave · 11 months ago

Totally. I've never said I wanted the newspapers to go away, in fact I've tried in every way I know to help them survive, but they haven't listened. So take it as a given that there's trouble in newspaperland. Now what do we do?

BTW, the tech press was decimated by the Internet long before general news was. There used to be lots of tech mags even weeklies. Now there are just a few pubs focused on tech, and the rest is what is captured (and molded unfortunately) by TM.

Our crisis in tech news is no less serious than the one being reported on by the MSM, except they only report their own trials and tribulations. They are wounded and too self-focused (some would say obsessed) to notice their plight is not particularly unique.

Michael Biven · 11 months ago

I agree with you and wasn't implying that you wanted newspapers to go away. My point was that there is a solution for what you described and that solution needs to be both adapted to the current environment for traditional news sources and be adopted by the online sources. My fears of seeing it diminished is due to the troubles in newspaperland and the general experience I've had with most online news (both tech and general) were most discussions end up looking like either a popularity contest or some irrelevant argument in a forum.

Michael Markman (Mickeleh) · 11 months ago

Could this just be a seasonal issue? Remember the crazy weekend meme-wars of yore? (My memory may be off, but I recall Scoble and Arrington were usually in the thick of them then as now.) At the moment we're in a two-week news drought because so many tech companies have forced vacations over the holidays. The simplest solution may be just to wait it out. Memeorandum seems to be doing much better than Techmeme at the moment.... because there's some actual news (mostly dreadful) to spin up.

dave · 11 months ago

My concern has been a long time thing, not just the holidays. Can't speak for anyone else.

When TM first appeared it was love at first sight, I wanted to buy full page ads in the WSJ and just run TM headlines on it, we were beating them so regularly. But it has descended into a few voices and a choir and the judgment they rely on isn't particularly good, imh, ymmv, ianal.

Any moment now Gabe is going to comment and bat his eyelashes and dismiss the concern. Doesn't matter to me -- I want better news. If he doesn't want to provide it then I have to figure out how to get it.

danmactough · 11 months ago

#3 is great. Steve Gillmor and Cori Schlegel have what appears to be one implementation at http://newsgang.net -- although, I'm not sure about how the stories are chosen, as it appears Steve is keeping the exact details under his hat.

moon · 11 months ago

Techmeme need to filter out linkbait

Steve · 11 months ago

seems like the sharing feature in Google Reader is something like you talk about. I think the concept of a "personal" river from the feeds you subscribe to is another thing missing. I subscribe to 350 feeds, why can't google reader (or whoever) find the cream of the crop and show it to me in a newspaper format. FeedDemon kind of has this feature. Take that and then run it on everyone's subscriptions.

Johan van Rooyen · 11 months ago

'as a self-described "media hacker" and news junkie,'

I guess that makes you a self-described, self-described "media hacker" - talk about metadata! :)

On a more serious note, Dave - I don't know if you have the stomach to blog about Israel's current slaughter in Gaza but in past I have valued your comments on comparable events very highly.

Heng-Cheong Leong · 11 months ago

I publish a few link blogs. How can I help? How can link blogs help?

ka9dgx · 11 months ago

Dave, I think that something radically different is called for. The basic problem as I see it is that a link doesn't express enough information. We need to be able to vote with our links, and it would be nice to be able to tag with them as well.

For example, we might want to express that a given story or item is:
insightful
funny
wrong
biased
poetic
controversial
technical
oversimplified

etc... etc..

This range of expressiveness would give aggregators a whole new universe of fodder to chew on. If we can somehow tie it to ID, even better... but tagging or flagging would be a good start.

Given your history, I believe you might be able to find enough wiggle room in the current HTML specs to propose something sane along these lines.

It could really help us all.

Paul Kapustka · 11 months ago

Maybe this could be set up like a standards body -- with representation from all the different flavors of the tech press, hardware, devices, networking, telecom, etc. Maybe with an unconference to kick it off?