Comments for New York Times Adds Techmeme-like Feature to Tech Section

New York Times Adds Techmeme-like Feature to Tech Section

2007-11-01T21:48:57Z

NYTimes.com has today launched a new version of its technology section, which includes more aggregation of news from around the Web. Of most interest perhaps is that its Techmeme-like news aggregator, Blogrunner, has been fully integrated into the Tech frontpage. It has the headline "Technology Headlines From Around the Web" and is positioned in the middle of the page. Blogrunner links will also feature at the bottom of NYT articles. Finally, two new feature content providers were announced today: IDG Media Brands and paidContent.org.

NYTimes.com/Tech Editor Saul Hansell told Read/WriteWeb in an email that Blogrunner "is our answer to Techmeme, integrated with our main site. It is technology we've built ourselves, based on Blogrunner, a company we bought last year." Further, Hansell said that "unlike Google News and Techmeme, we aren't trying to prove machines can be better editors than people. We have a hybrid model, with Web Crawlers and Editors both helping find and ranks posts."

Blogrunner.com is a news aggregator that was acquired by the Times Company in 2005. NY Times has been building on the service since then - at one stage it was called "The Annotated New York Times". In February 2006 we wrote that Blogrunner offered an "interesting way to remix the NY Times and bring in external citations"; although we didn't think it was one of the top news aggregators at that point.

It's taken a long time for NY Times to integrate external news aggregation technology into their website, but kudos to them for doing it now. It provides opportunities for leading tech blogs - such as Techcrunch, PaidContent and of course Read/WriteWeb - to distribute their content to a wider audience. It also exposes NY Times readers to the more social - and arguably much faster - news cycle of leading blogs.

Blogrunner itself still seems behind Techmeme in some areas. For example Techmeme provides an easy-to-scan look at all related stories, on its frontpage. Whereas you only get the top story on Blogrunner's frontpage - you need to click the "related" link to see all the coverage. Also, and admittedly this could be seen as a pro rather than a con by mainstream readers, the publications tracked by Blogrunner are chosen by New York Times editors (thankfully R/WW seems to be among the chosen ones!).

So there is a strong editorial focus with Blogrunner, which NY Times states in its press release "enables readers to get a thoughtful overview of the day's top print and online coverage, all on one site." I think this is a sensible move, as a key part of the NY Times experience is its reputation for editorial quality - so Blogrunner should leverage that. As noted above, Google News and Techmeme by comparison are automated (although with both, the initial news sources were editorially selected).

All in all a great move by NY Times - tell us what you think in the comments. Will you use the NY Times Tech frontpage more because of this new feature?

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Comment from Joseph Pally on 2007-11-01

2007-11-02T03:10:06Z

Another portal wannabe. Yahoo was enough.

Comment from Bill Ross on 2007-11-02

2007-11-02T19:00:26Z

Looks to me like the previous commenter, Mr. Pally (like the NYT-style naming? ; ) , is a Web-first guy. But, as I pointed out to my colleagues at AltaVista -- holy crap, about nine years ago, when the concept of "portals" was first hot -- newspapers were the original portals, back in the print age.

It made sense to me then, and has turned out in practice, that newspapers' sites would serve that role best in the electronic age. Why? Because newspaper people have at least some instinct to show people what they need to know, as opposed to only what they want to know. Contrast nytimes.com, which leads with hard news, to aol's home page, a garish mish-mosh of primarily celebrity gossip and similar junk.

Let's test that right now... okay, as I expected, Yahoo's top featured story is "10 most popular cable shows;" the New York Times' are, "Employment Report Shows 166,000 Gain in Jobs" and "Rice Under Pressure as Trip to Turkey Begins." I rest my case. (...Except to point out that another way to say "most popular" is "lowest common denominator.")

But, about the story, here, the introduction of the NYT's use of a news aggregator to their Tech page. To me, the significant element is that it's not just a machine they flipped on and then left the room, but "a hybrid model, with Web Crawlers and Editors both helping find and ranks posts," in Hansell's words.

There you go, that's the ticket. "User-generated content" and selection by Pagerank, etc., is great for allowing any news organization to cast a wider net, and a good use of the possibilities presented by this wild child, the Internet -- as long as skilled human eyes are continuously watching and making intelligent choices on it all.

I've been writing in my own humble blog about this quality-deficient fascination with unmoderated "free content" for the last year or so, claiming, "it is still considered to be true that 'You get what you pay for,'" and tagging those posts, The Lack of Wisdom Of Crowds:
http://rosswriting.blogspot.com/search/label/Lack%20of%20wisdom%20of%20crowds

I generally start my surfing at NYT, as I so often did with the paper version (the original "portal"), and am glad to see the Grey Lady spiffing up her wardrobe while still keeping her head about it.