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Meet The Top Techmeme Tipper: Atul
The big Techmeme news last month in the was that the site opened its doors to tippers. Techmeme founder, and one of BusinessWeek’s Top 25 most influential people on the Web, Gabe Rivera noted that now for the first time ever, humans could submit "tips" to the Techmeme engine. The idea with the tips is to help a news-breaking story get to the Techmeme page and process quicker than it would normally via the TM engine. It does look like the tips seem to work when you tip a popular Techmeme source while sites that rarely (or never) get leads, won’t get them even with a tip.
We’ve seen top tech bloggers sending in tips for their own stories. And many others have submitted tips here and there. But from what I can tell, it looks like one person has risen above the others in terms of a "tip to lead" (known hereunto as the TTL) ratio.
Atul Arora from Freemont, California is able to get more tips to turn into leads than any of the other tippers. Check out the screenshot below to see his tipping power – this shot comes from midday yesterday and shows the top 2 stories were both tipped via his account. Atul is a master networker with over 500+ contacts on LinkedIn. Check out Atul’s Friendfeed account with links to all of his social services. I have contacted Atul and hope to conduct a full interview with him soon. I’d like to learn more about how he determines which sites to tip and which stories to tip. I guess to some extent he is the MrBabyMan of Techmeme.
I wonder how far off we are from a Techmeme Tipper Leaderboard. The leaderboard would display the top 100 tippers, their "TTL" ratio, and which sites they have tipped. We could also see in the future a Techmeme Top Sites Tipped Leaderboard which would display the top sites that have received leads via a tip.
Related: The Semi-Human Techmeme: A Month Later
Update: Gabe replied in the comments including, "I can share some stats: to date 196 headlines hitting Techmeme were tipped prior to appearing, and 89 different people have tipped. There are dominant tippers, but the tail, naturally, is long."
thanks for the stats gabe – what we don’t know is if the story makes a lead automatically when tipped or if one of your human workers decide after reviewing each tip. it sure does look like 1-2 sites get the majority of the tips – one of the reasons people appeared to like TM was that there was supposed to be a (somewhat) level playing field – with tips it no longer is level because naturally the sites with 85,000 followers will get RT more which will lead to more tips. I can’t say I am a fan of the tip program but understand that it is awesome marketing idea for your service.
Hello Gabe
Thanks that you are impressed with tips. I personally think it is good idea that techmeme is using a crowdsourcing approach to uncover newsworthy stuff.
You are right in your assessment that I have just worked in the tipping into my regular news flow.
Cheers
Atul
Oh yeah, Atul’s tips have impressed us, and he is indeed the top tipper currently. I’ve never met or contacted the guy, but I imagine he’s always stayed on top of tech news, and has just worked tipping Techmeme into his regular news flow. I would not be surprised if over time more people did this. Overall, I think Techmeme is better for it.
I can share some stats: to date 196 headlines hitting Techmeme were tipped prior to appearing, and 89 different people have tipped. There are dominant tippers, but the tail, naturally, is long.
You’re right that tips to most of the obscure blogs are passed over, but most of those posts aren’t so good for Techmeme and unsurprisingly are tipped by the post author. It should be clear that there’s no tip we love more than a link to something truly newsworthy on a lesser known blog. (Some examples: http://www.techmeme.com/090211/p44#a090211p44 http://www.techmeme.com/090208/p15#a090208p15 )
Gabe, I could set twitter username with 200 feeds trowing bomb on techmemeFH and still you would not appreciate that nor would I because it’s all automated just like Atul does (No hard feelings Atul, been just honest :) ).
Anyways bin bit disappointed in your responses Gabe. Blogs that write after few hours later you list yet blogs that broke the news you do not add….let’s call it fairness :)
PS: U know who I am.
I share the same view as Allen – Atul is great tipper and Gabe too finds his tips “impressive”.
Got a related question for Gabe – if some story from a lesser known blog is included in Techmeme via the twitter tip, do you include that blog forever in your index or do we tip it again if that blog breaks another great story?
Thanks.
Amit, Gabe has told me that a site will not get into the seed list just because they post one great blog. Let’s say a blog posts over and over great things, then Gabe will probably add it at some point. (I don’t know how he decides that). It’s safest to just keep tipping great stuff, though, from what Gabe told me last weekend when I met him at a brunch in San Francisco.
thumbs up for Atul!
Arpit – Thanks. Cheers – Atul
Hello Allen
Thanks for the rather flattering article about me on Valentine’s Day 2009 :-) I am glad that my contributions to Techmeme via the tips caught your eye. I really appreciate for writing about it on your esteemed blog.
I don’t believe I have any secret sauce in determining the sites or tips. Most of my tips are about the companies I follow – Google/Facebook/Yahoo/Twitter/FriendFeed. My news sources (in most of the cases) are the corporate blogs or NYTimes or WSJ. Occassionally, I do see a tweet in my twitter stream that is very newsworthy. In such cases, I send it over to Techmeme ASAP so it shows up on Techmeme before it’s regular crawl cycle. Feb 13’s tip on Twitter funding is on such example.
I am sure I have just been lucky to tip earlier than other folks. Over a period of time, I am sure there will be more diversity in terms of people sending tips to techmeme.
Cheers
Atul
dude had 12,000 likes on friendfeed – is that even possible?