McCarthy will help the site aim for its goal of providing "the clearest and most useful tech news overview available." She'll watch for out-of-date "memes" that just happen to have risen mistakenly from the dead and we presume she'll be assisting the Techmeme algorithm in its search for new sources to include.

Rivera says the human touch will land primarily on Techmeme but that it may influence sister sites like political aggregator Memeorandum to some degree in the future. Memeorandum is quite a phenomenon itself; see, for example, the Guardian's high praise of the site posted yesterday.

In addition to advancing the discussion about the relationship between automation and human editing, McCarthy's hire is interesting on a number of other levels. It proves that the site's now two year old sponsorship model of selling prominent placement for sponsor companies' own latest blog posts has proven a success. It is interesting that the site's first human editor is a woman, the site has been criticized repeatedly for being unfairly male dominated. It's also interesting that McCarthy's most prominent previous gig was writing for Silicon Valley bottom-feeders Valleywag, an employer that some might consider the kiss of death for a tech journalist and the arch-nemesis of Michael Arrington's TechCrunch - the single most dominant news source on Techmeme for years (another matter Techmeme has been repeatedly criticized over).

Mostly, though, we're just jealous that McCarthy has landed such a sweet gig. Check out McCarthy's invisible handy-work at Techmeme.com, goodness knows we do every 15 minutes.

Photo by Brian Solis