The Semi-Human Techmeme: A Month Later

A month ago Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera announced that he hired an editor, Megan McCarthy, to help create a more "edited" Techmeme. Gabe noted in his announcement, "an additional human editor will carry out changes explicitly to directly improve the mix of headlines on Techmeme. Though the implicit edits conveyed via algorithm outnumber the explicit edits perhaps by 1000 to 1 or more, the impact of the human editor is nonetheless pronounced".

The change I’ve noticed the most is that more stories are receiving "lead" status with no visible links. I am guessing this is where the editor plays the biggest role. She can make stories live immediately versus waiting for the algorithm to pick them up and do it’s magic of link association. Oh yea, bitchmemes (staged or real) are apparently an excellent way to boost a blog’s standings on the leaderboard.

Many seemed to believe that Michael Arrington, holder of the top slot (then and now), was nervous that the leaderboard would change based on a post he authored after the news was made public. Marshall Kirkpatrick discussed the Techmeme advertising model and the hiring of a woman as the first editor. Susan Mernit also looks at the revenue model and provides some Techmeme revenue estimates for 2008.

Several new sites are listed on the current leaderboard but weren’t on the list as of December 5th. They are: InternetNews, jkOnTheRun, TUAW, TheOpenRoad, InsideFacebook, Loic LeMeur Blog, Agence France Presse, Google Mobile Blog, Hardware 2.0, DSLReports, PE Hub Blog, Zero Day, Lifehacker, Gawker (probably took over for Valleywag), Fast Company, Inquirer, Apple, TmoNews, Tech Daily Dose, The Bivings Report, Scobleizer, Telegraph, Hitwise Intelligence, Louis Gray, and The Digital Home.

For reference here’s the Techmeme leaderboard as of December 5, 2008 and January 4, 2009: