Techmeme is on fire this morning with discussion of Rafe Needleman’s CNet post about Twitter’s supposed plans to index the content of links shared over the microblogging service.
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.
This week Microsoft didn’t get much hype for its three major announcements. Certainly it didn’t stay on top of TechMeme as long as, say, if Steve Jobs gets a sniffle. But don’t miss what they did.
It hasn’t even been a month since Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a German blog that growth, not monetization, was the priority for the social-networking site. In fact, he even went so far as to say that he didn’t see a revenue plan coming into play for three more years.
Early every morning, I open my Web browser and load up a half-dozen “aggregator” sites: Techmeme, Memeorandum, Real Clear Politics, Google News, the Drudge Report, and the Huffington Post. This is my first sortie into the day’s news, the way I orient myself to what’s going on in the world now that I no longer subscribe to a print newspaper.
In its first major upgrade ever, Google Blogsearch just relaunched and looks radically different. Instead of the blank page look of Google.com, Blogsearch now looks like Google News (but uglier)–with the hottest topics from the blogosphere aggregated on the front page.
Yesterday evening I took a quick look at Techmeme and saw that the top two posts at that point in time were Tim O’Reilly and my responses to Mike Arrington’s Yahoo post. I clicked through to see Tim’s post and noticed that Tim had done the same thing that I had done; simply cut and paste the comment I had left on Arrington’s post onto my blog.
I just switched all my home pages off of Techmeme to FriendFeed.
I find that Techmeme has become a Google News killer. All I see on it is big media companies (including me, who works at Fast Company).
On top of my FriendFeed right now are people I don’t know. No A-listers. I’m not there.
We received an interesting email today from Business Wire, a press-release wire service that Warren Buffett bought in March 2006. Currently Business Wire is ranked about No. 32 on the Techmeme Leaderboard, which puts it above some top tech blogs (but not ReadWriteWeb, which is ranked No. 6 currently). The email claimed that companies and marketers can use Business Wire to bypass journalists and bloggers to get into key news sources like Techmeme and search-engine results too. Is this true? I think it’s a fair claim–and there’s no reason why Business Wire shouldn’t feature in Techmeme if it is “breaking” news stories or is being linked to by bloggers. In fact it does indeed route around blogs that simply regurgitate PR–which is a good thing in my book!
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