Also in March, business social network LinkedIn launched a social news service called LinkedIn Today. Is this service needed, or is it simply duplicating Techmeme, Google News and similar social news sites? Let's find out...

How to Use LinkedIn Today

At heart, LinkedIn Today is a semi-personalized news portal. You start by selecting certain industries and news sources to follow. Your LinkedIn Today front page then serves up news from those industries and sources. For example, I am following the 'Internet' and 'Online Media' industries, among others. I also follow ReadWriteWeb, PaidContent and other sources that I like to check daily.

The way LinkedIn Today works is simple yet clever. Taking the 'Internet' industry as an example, it claims to serve up "the most shared news by people in the Internet Industry." LinkedIn Today knows which industries its users are in from their LinkedIn profiles.

For example, I categorized myself in the Internet industry in my LinkedIn profile (see below screenshot).

So if I 'share' a tech news story to LinkedIn Today, it essentially votes that story up on the Internet industry frontpage. The same applies if I tweet it, provided that I've connected my Twitter profile to LinkedIn. Indeed, Twitter is probably responsible for the majority of sharing activity on LinkedIn Today.

One of the best features of LinkedIn Today is being able to see who shared a particular article. Using my own Kindle article from yesterday as an example:

I can drill down on any of those names, to see what they do for a living. (btw I'm not in the habit of sharing my own articles, I only did that one for test purposes!)

How LinkedIn Today Compares to Other Social News Services

So how does the news delivered by LinkedIn Today compare to the likes of Techmeme (more of a curated news service than a social one, but still similar) and Google News?

As with many social news services, a few publications appear to dominate LinkedIn Today. At the time of writing, the blog SearchEngineLand had the top story. It also had two other headlines on the 'Internet' industry page. AOL's tech blog TechCrunch and social media blog Mashable each had two stories in the headlines. The only other sources to have a prominent headline as of writing were NYC blog Business Insider and mainstream news site USA Today, who each had one.

In comparison, Techmeme has more headlines per page and thus more sources - although it too is often dominated by just a few news sites. Google News has more of a technology bent than both LinkedIn Today and Techmeme, with services like PCWorld and Ars Technica near the top as of writing.

The Ping Effect

Overall, LinkedIn Today seems to be relatively well-used. It's already one of ReadWriteWeb's leading traffic drivers, which is always a good indication of the success of a social news site.

It's fair to say that LinkedIn Today has avoided The Ping Effect. Although, it's also never going to become the leading social news source for the various industries it covers. Specialist social news services, like Techmeme or the tech news community Hacker News, will always have a broader and deeper selection of news than LinkedIn.

But for the business-oriented user, who wants to stay on top of what others in his or her industry are reading, LinkedIn Today offers good value. In addition, the social hooks are actually useful - they allow you to find similarly minded people to connect to on LinkedIn.

Are you a LinkedIn Today user? We'd love to hear your thoughts about it in the comments below. Also, don't forget to add ReadWriteWeb as one of your sources in LinkedIn Today!

For each news story, TechDygest aggregates coverage from multiple news sources, then offers up a paragraph from each source and links out to the originals. You can generally get a good high-level overview of the news items by looking at the headlines and reading the excerpted paragraphs. You can also get a feel for the tone of the various articles covering the story and pick which one to read based on that.

Give it a try for yourself and let us know if it feels like something you'd come back to regularly for a quick news catch-up. I like it.

Site founder Gabe Rivera downplayed the news in a conversation with me, but I think it's a big deal. The leading technology industry news aggregator continues to move from nearly 100% automated link analysis at its birth five years ago, to half-human assisted with the hiring first of Megan McCarthy two years ago and later a team of editors and now this - a direct line to add smart quips to clusters of highlighted, long-form coverage of news events.

Rivera's email to whitelisted Tweeters (including myself, at least until I reported on this) included the following instructions:

Please be smart and insightful if you take advantage of this. Something more than just snark. (Though snark combined with insightful is fine!)

Short version: If you tweet something and include a Techmeme permalink, your tweet *will* appear in "Discussion" under the headline you've linked, because your Twitter account is on our whitelist!

Rivera emphasized in conversation that it wasn't just the whitelisted community members whose Tweets would appear on the site and that the ranking of all topical Twitter messages is something he's experimenting with.

The site has faced allegations of elitism and favoritism since the day it launched and critics will undoubtedly see more of the same in this new experiment. Fans far outnumber critics of the site, though, and between Techmeme's cold-hearted algorithm and its "librarians on speed" beneficent editors, I think the mix of coverage there works out quite well.

The formula developed on Techmeme has been spun out into other sites on other topics, most notably Mediagazer, a site aggregating coverage of media industry news. Techmeme's first hire, Megan McCarthy, now edits Mediagazer. Former ReadWriteWeb reporter Lidija Davis is Techmeme's lead editor durring the US daytime. The site now has a staff of six humans, working beside computer scientist Rivera's much-refined news discovery and ranking machine.

Imagine This Everywhere

The press loves to pounce on the Twitter updates of well-known people in all kinds of fields, from Hollywood to US foreign policy. Imagine if other media outlets created a direct pipeline for those people to post their comments on coverage directly to the coverage itself! Might the front page of The New York Times someday include an appended quote like: "This article gives too much credit to the Republican party's strategic thinking." - @BarackObama.

Probably not. But other media outlets are sure to take steps like Techmeme has today to capture and incorporate the most glamorous of User Generated Content into their own output. More likely than requiring a permalink to coverage, as Techmeme does of tech geek Twitter users whose personal brand audiences are generally smaller than the aggregator's is, other sites will use keyword matching in filtering Tweets from the stars of stage, screen and industry. It's a compelling value proposition for readers.

Can the whitelisted Twitter users deliver? It's a risk, but smart move by Techmeme - and something we're sure to see variations on elsewhere in the future.

Tech news aggregator site Techmeme got its start in 2005 as an automated, algorithmic collection of blog posts organized according to inbound links and blogosphere conversations. When we first reviewed the site, we noted that "the beauty of it is, only posts with a decent amount of writing in them make the memeorandum page. A simple link and a sentence won't do." Today, that's all changed.

Techmeme editor and founder Gabe Rivera announced this morning, appropriately by Tweet, that the site would now be including Tweets among the up-to-the-moment headlines.

"@Techmeme now helps #tech #PR subvert the media," tweets Jonathon Gardner.

"@gaberivera techmeme has a cleverness algorithm now? Or is that @megan [RWW alum]@madlid and @ScepticGeek?" asks Kevin Marks.

"I suppose only insiders will get credit for tips, still? Techmeme is acting just like digg before the fall," notes Ed Shahzade.

Of course, you don't have to take my word for it, because this entire Twitter conversation is laid out for all to view on the top of Techmeme.

Rivera explained a bit more behind the new feature in a blog post, saying that by not including Tweets, Techmeme had been missing out:

For as long as newsmakers have used Twitter, tweets have broken news stories. And yet for Techmeme, linking directly to tweets was never imperative - after all most newsworthy tweets are blogged within minutes, moreover with helpful context. But still it seemed as if something was missing in passing over tweets: we'd miss the first few minutes of certain developing stories as well as opportunities for including good commentary. We also missed the chance to let certain sources simply speak under their own byline. And so, at last, we've begun incorporating tweets on Techmeme.

Rivera explained that Tweets included on Techmeme would come in two forms: breaking news and commentary.

In some ways, the addition of Tweets completes the transformation of Techmeme from everything it once wasn't to what it is today. It started off as a completely automated, algorithmic aggregator of tech news. Over time, a number of editors were hired on and it became a bit of a cyborg in nature. Most recently, the site began posting links directly to vendor blogs and announcements, not to contextual stories by other news outlets. Now, it does the one thing it wouldn't do when it first started out. Now, a simple link and a sentence will do.

There's just one question - at what point does Techmeme become not a link to news, but a breaking source on its own? And when does it change from a source of traffic for blogs to a source of competition?

In 2005, tech.memeorandum mostly tracked blogs. In 2010, Techmeme tracks all types of media web sites. Everything from news wires, newspapers, professional blogs, corporate blogs and personal blogs. That's been a natural evolution, as blogs have become more like newspapers and magazines - and vice versa. What's been more surprising is Techmeme's shift from full automation to a mix of algorithms and human curation. In this interview with Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera, we talk about these and other changes over the past 5 years.

GR: We're six in total. Same staff as last November.

RWW: Back when you started, there weren't very many products where a person could discover the latest news from blogs and media web sites. Nowadays there's Google News, Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, et al. How do you position Techmeme now in terms of the increased competition?

GR: For sure, the world has changed, and as you point out, there are more places to find collections of news links other than Techmeme. But some of those same changes favor a site like Techmeme even more. Following even a modest set of users on Twitter, for instance, you're overwhelmed with tweets and links after spending just a few hours away from your stream. There's really no substitute for a news synopsis that shows you what's most important at the top.

RWW: Back in 2005 I mused that "mainstream news media organizations will be beating a path to Gabe's door to either invest in it or license the software." Has any of that happened or come close to happening?

GR: It didn't play out quite like that. We've received overtures from most of the larger tech companies over the years, but media companies have approached us mainly about distribution deals, and only a couple of companies at that. I'd say this this is understandable though: we haven't demonstrated that what we've accomplished at Techmeme can be done over lots of verticals and localities.

Tech.memeorandum, October 2005 (via Internet Archive)

RWW: The biggest change in the product over the years seems to be that it's moved from being entirely automated to being a mix of automated and manual editing. Can you tell us how the mix works in practice, and what benefits you've seen from that.

GR: Philosophically, I believe human editing plus automation have always been and will always be needed for top-notch aggregation. Pure automation sufficed for a few years for us, and got us to the point where we could hire more editors. But until editors arrived, Techmeme would often make questionable choices - like spotlighting too many redundant stories, keeping obsolete stories on the page, and overemphasizing odd topics only introspective bloggers care about. Also, obviously significant stories would often take much too long to appear.

In the age of Twitter and hyper competitive news bloggers, even a 15 minute delay on big news is inexcusable. Our editing helps on all these fronts: we can block the automation from posting stuff to the site, and instantly post stuff if need be.

Techmeme, September 2010

RWW: Is your new product model, mix of automated and manual editing, scalable? I guess that companies like Demand Media show that such a model can be scaled (not that I'm comparing your company to theirs in other ways). But I'm curious to know your thoughts.

GR: I believe it's scalable, at least for major news topics. New news vertical can start out with just one human editor, so we only need revenue to support one person. But it isn't scalable to hundreds or thousands of news topics. An aggregator on, say, mountain bikes probably wouldn't be all that good (due to a dearth of content and linking) - meaning it wouldn't attract readers that could support an editor.

RWW: Finally, what's next for Techmeme and its sister sites?

GR: More ways for tweets to show up on Techmeme. And hopefully more verticals.

Photo credit: Frank Gruber

Our conclusion? The media is talking about plenty of other things! There were also some surprises in the numbers. We also spoke with Gabe Rivera, founder of tech news blog aggregator Techmeme, whom we caught red-handed being more Apple-centric than any of these other sources. Even his site talks less about Apple than we expected, though.

Techmeme

People give machine + human tech blog aggregator Techmeme a hard time all the time about being too fixated on Apple.

Over the last five days (the accessible archives) there have been 260 headlines that hit Techmeme. How many have included the words Apple or iPhone? 55. That's 21%. General perception among people we asked was that it would be around 35%. So it's less than we thought! Almost 80% of stories on Techmeme have been about something else!

Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera was surprised the number was that low, but said he believes that much coverage is warranted. "Apple is a more important company now [than it used to be]."

"It's pushing the all manufacturers to improve their design aesthetics and quality. It's demonstating to the world how a large company can execute at a high level and iterate nimbly on great products. Apple is at the center of so many important trends. Apple's rigidness and remorselessness on their iOS platform is also hugely important, and everyone is taking notice: people working inside Apple's ecosystem, and people working on competing platforms."

Techmeme is a tech blog aggregator, though. What about general, mainstream news?

Google News

Ever wonder how many stories Google News publishes links to in a week? I don't know the exact number, but I do know that 1,265,038 of them contained the word "the OR to OR if OR on OR as OR but OR why OR who OR what " in the headline.

How many search results for Apple OR iPhone in the last week? 75,409 or 6% of all news stories on Google News in the last week. Not just tech stories. I'm surprised the number is that high! Are you?

Digg

Did you know there are less than 200 Google search results across the whole Web for the phrase "Apple fanboys on Digg"? It's not that big a thing, it turns out. Of the 855 stories that have hit the front page of Digg over this iPhone 4 launch week, a mere 19 of them have had the words Apple or iPhone in the headline. That's 2%! Less Apple on Digg than on any other source!

I guess now you know where to go if you're sick of hearing about it.

This Blog: ReadWriteWeb

ReadWriteWeb? We've published 131 stories this week and 13 of them have included the word Apple or iPhone in the headline. That's 10% - and to be fair several other stories had the word FaceTime in the headline.

We're really excited about the iPhone - what it means, how to jailbreak it, etc. But we're not as excited about it as Techmeme!

So what do you think - is this an appropriate amount of coverage for the iPhone? Too much? Too little? Less than you thought? More? We know you want to talk about the thing! Let it all out in the comments - you'll feel better.

Mediagazer is the first new service that Rivera's team has launched in four years. As both Rivera and McCarthy note, the team has spent the last four years learning about what works (and what doesn't). Based on this experience, the team has "outfitted the site with the latest iteration of our automation engine, and have launched it from the outset with a dedicated human editor."

It will be interesting to see how Rivera's team will manage the overlap between the tech news and media news sites. Currently, for example, this VentureBeat story - which is about both the tech and the media business - is featured on both sites.

Unlike Techmeme, Mediagazer doesn't feature a leaderboard, but there are mobile sites for smartphones and feature phones.

Judging from what we have seen so far, Mediagazer will surely become another must-read site for anybody interested in the media business, be it blogging, e-book or the state of the newspaper industry.

For more information about the role of the human editors at Techmeme, also have a look at our interview with Megan McCarthy.

DailyPerfect hails from Estonia and is an incubator project of investment company Ambient Sound Investments (ASI), who we interviewed earlier this week on ReadWriteStart. DailyPerfect uses behavioral targeting to try and predict a user's interests, through what the company says is "an automated semantic analysis of publicly available information on the web." The company is also releasing an API.

Does it Work?

When you first enter the site, you're asked to enter your name into a textbox. Then you sit back and wait for the personalized news to come rolling in, based on your 'digital footprint.'

The topics that DailyPerfect thought I would like initially were a motley bunch. Some were correct, like 'web 2.0' and 'alternative music.' Some were broad enough to have little chance of not being correct, such as 'History' and 'Fiction.' But there were also some perplexing topics presented to me: for example 'Mining' and 'Benelux countries' (Belgium, Luxembourg or The Netherlands). However the site offers the familiar thumbs up or down beside each option, so you can train the system. The thumbs also apply to individual stories.

There are also options to follow people and websites, which is useful in this age of Twitter and blogging. With websites, you can import your OPML file of websites you subscribe to in your RSS Reader of choice. I entered my Google Reader OPML file, however it only seemed to include a random selection of my feeds.

The site is well designed and the stories were fairly relevant to me. However we can safely say that it's no Techmeme challenger. For one thing it doesn't bind the same story from different sources together, which may be Techmeme's enduring killer feature. Anyone can scan Techmeme and quickly find out what the trending stories are, and what sources either originated it or are the most popular links.

DailyPerfect, on the other hand, appears to select just one source for each story - and it's a mystery how that is done. I saw a few links each to Telegraph, Reuters, and Macworld; along with links to a smattering of blogs, including one ReadWriteWeb story. There was even a Techmeme link in there.

Conclusion: Not Perfect, Maybe Useful

I'm unconvinced by the claims of personalization, semantic analysis and other technical fandangery that DailyPerfect made in its PR. Many new web apps make these same claims, but the proof is in the pudding - and as of now I don't see anything particularly special about the content served up by DailyPerfect.

I can't honestly see myself continuing to use DailyPerfect. It's likely to join the long list of web apps I've tried once and then never came back to. Admittedly, that's probably because I'm an information hound that looks for (and needs, for my work) context in my daily news fix. DailyPerfect may well suit casual news readers who don't require a wide choice of news, but simply a well-picked selection of stories. The question is whether those types of readers want an automated solution like DailyPerfect (other options include the well-established Topix, or a site like PopURLs), or whether they want the human curation touch that aggregator news sites like Huffington Post and CNET offer.

News aggregation and filtering is a crowded field, and DailyPerfect is going to need to do more than throw around words like "personalization," "semantic," and "predictive" if they're to survive and thrive.

So why even bother covering yet another Techmeme wannabe? Because competition is important. Techmeme may do a great job, but innovation can still be found elsewhere.

So who's the new contender? It's a site called TechNews.AM, "your morning dose of tech news." Given that tag line, it's clear they know just who their target demographic is: the geeks who start their day, coffee in hand, browsing through the latest stories from across the blogosphere.

Before you get too judgmental about the site's shortcomings, take note of their other tag line: "SSSH, NOT EVEN IN ALPHA YET." In other words, what we see now may not be the final product. Your complaints and feature requests could still be resolved by the time it goes gold.

The Layout

The first thing you'll notice about the site is that its structure is very different from that of Techmeme. Instead of headlines and "echoing" links, each article is its own headline and standalone post. The posts are sorted into two main columns: "Popular Today," which seems to look back on the past 24 hours, and "Upcoming," which features the breaking stories, all of which are time-stamped for freshness. In a sidebar, the popular stories and topics (tags) of the week are featured as well.

The thing that's most appealing about TechNews.AM's layout, though, is the sub-categories across the top which feature tech blogosphere niches like gadgets, marketing, mobile, search engines, social media, UX, web development, startups, jobs, management, and opinion. This is a pretty accurate reflection of precisely the kinds of categories we already have set up in Google Reader, so it looks like TechNews.AM could almost function as an alternative to RSS, at least for the more casual news consumer if not for the pro bloggers hunting for stories. It's also going to appeal to people who are generally only interested in tracking one or two niches, as each sub-page tracks the headlines, the popular tags, and the most read stories of the day and the week.

More of an Aggregator than Memetracker

Beyond that, there isn't much more to this news portal just yet. It's clear that it currently functions more as an aggregator than a memetracker, so Techmeme may have nothing to worry about. The sources for the news at TechNews.AM also seem limited to the top blogs you would expect and the site doesn't appear capable of highlighting the serendipitous B-List and C-List blogs that occasionally break news on Techmeme.

TechNews.AM is powered by memeriver, a social media strategy and web development agency that also runs a similar site called queensspeech. That "sister site," if you will, features gay news, views, and opinion and may hint towards where TechNews.AM is headed in terms of features and structure. (Note: queensspeech may be NSFW depending, as language is uncensored).

As it stands now, we don't see TechNews.AM killing Techmeme by any means, but we like its clean layout and sub-categories for tracking niche tech news. That said, we're not sure if it will become a daily read of ours unless they add in more sources.

From the panel, Marshall and Louis had new sources and gathering tips, Gabe and Melanie weighed in heavily on how to manage information and Micah had some great suggestions on discovery of new information sources.

Marshall Kirkpatrick

Twitter - FriendFeed

• Marshall focused on using tools like FriendFeed, combined RSS feeds and Google Custom Search Engines (CSEs) to find the news he needs.
• He highlighted a post he wrote entitled How to Find the Weirdest Stuff on the Internet that describes how to use free tools to create a mashup that finds unique content.  It uses tag clouds in Delicious, finds culture blogs, filters that output through PostRank, then finally pushes it through Feedburner.
• Finally, Marshall returned to how CSEs can work in conjunction with drag and drop zones to quickly search for content online.

Louis Gray

Twitter - FriendFeed

• He uses Google Reader as his primary info-gathering tool. 
• He shares his content from Google Reader to other resource sites such as Delicious, Friendfeed, and Twitter.
• Louis uses FriendFeed to find trusted sources for news and content.
• He pointed out the DailyRadar network of sites like MacBlips and GadgetBlips that aggregate more niche content for discovery.
• Finally, Louis mentioned that in order to blog about new content, often the top priority is good old fashioned networking.

Gabe Rivera

Twitter - FriendFeed

• Gabe Rivera uses Techmeme for selecting the best of what is out there.
• He described that Techmeme is based on an automated system that relies primarily on links between clustered stories to determine how much a story should be ranked, but has recently introduced a 'human element' in the form of Megan McCarthy, the new editor for the site.
• Marshall added that Gabe has some non-tech Techeme-style link blogs, like Memeorandum and Ballbug.
• Gabe says entering new content areas is often difficult because an aggregator needs both fresh content and good metadata to be able to aggregate effectively.

Micah Baldwin

Twitter - FriendFeed

• Micah says he often starts searching for new content by going to one of his favorite, most trusted bloggers, and then searching outward from there. He mentioned that there are a lot of tools to help with this, and Lijit is just one of them.
• As an example, he highlighted a Lijit-powered blog aggregator called Securitybloggers, but he also stresses that influence of a blogger is important. Take recommendation + expertise and you will find new content.
• He said that the I Can Has Cheezburger (ICHC) folks are always looking for the next big meme. A natural place to find new memes is applications like Friendfeed.
• Micah mentioned that ICHC just acquired Twittypic to create Son of a Tweet, a tool that leverages Twitter for finding funny pictures.

Melanie Baker

Work Twitter - Personal Twitter - FriendFeed

• Melanie, in her role as community manager, gets her information from many sources but uses her company's product PostRank to filter stories by buzz and popularity.
• PostRank (formerly called AideRSS) is a system that measures engagement surrounding blog posts by tracking references on over 15 different social media sites, including site comments, Digg, FriendFeed, Furl, Twitter and more.
• Melanie says there are plenty of communities out there to draw from, from her perspective of blogs that use PostRank and Lijit.

Wrap Up

The audience asked what this process of discovering and collecting new sources of content online might be called. After a bit of discussion, the panelists decided the term curation works well, followed by trusted discovery and trusted recommendations.

Overall, we thought the panel exposed those listening to tips and techniques that, while part of a seasoned social media worker's toolkit, may not be leveraged as effectively by newcomers or light social media users.

Six weeks ago popular tech news aggregator Techmeme began accepting story tips submitted on Twitter. Today PopURLs, an older and more diverse aggregator, began doing the same thing. This is probably just the beginning; so many journalists are on Twitter that it only makes sense that people will systematize the harvesting of news tips. The early experiment at Techmeme indicates though that the long tail of Twitter tips may not be so long after all. A handful of Twitter users are dominating the system.

Techmeme and PopURLs won't be the last organizations to lean on Twitter for news. We've learned that Techmeme competitor Techfuga will roll out the same feature next week and Firefox bookmarking plug-in Shareaholic will be including a button to send tips to Techmeme as well. Techfuga will be building its index using Twitter tips, which is similar to how the already established Techmeme is using the system.

Allen Stern at CenterNetworks has added a "techmeme tip" button at the end of all his blog posts and a handful of other top tech blogs have said they will be doing the same. Just like mainstream media outlets have added "Digg this" buttons to their sites, we're sure they'll be leveraging Twitter for tips soon as well.

How Are Sites Dealing With Twitter Tips?

Techmeme is a flurry of activity, updating every 5 minutes most hours day and night. It's edited primarily by a complex algorithm years in the works and in part by its new human editor Megan McCarthy. Tips are submitted to the site via Twitter by adding "tips @techmeme" to any post with a link in it. McCarthy's exact role in putting stories on the front page of the site is mysterious but she's got some hand in it. Tipped headlines are sometimes pushed to the site manually and sometimes they make it there automatically, site founder Gabe Rivera told us.

PopURLS, on the other hand, doesn't use any human intervention. Twitter tips there just augment the company's existing Twitter hotness tracker. That site then feeds into PopURLs.

Far more journalists are presumably trolling Twitter for unsubmitted news tips. We've been doing that for more than a year and Sky News just hired a correspondent who is working Twitter full time.

Who is Doing the Tipping?

We've gathered the numbers below from the last 7 days of Twitter tips to Techmeme.

We looked at the last 500 tweeted tips and here's what we saw.

• They were submitted by 110 different people.


• 44% of those submissions came from one man, a Bay Area engineer in the health insurance industry named Atul Arora. (Atul submitted 224 tips to Techmeme in the last week.)


• 17% of the tips came from Mrinal Desai, an early LinkedIn employee and now co-founder at tech help company CrossLoop.


• Those two men make 61% of the tips to Techmeme. The remaining 39% of the tips come from a list of 108 other people, most of whom have only made one or two tips in the last week.

How are those tips working out? Do Arora and Desai dominate the accepted submissions as well? In fact they do, though only a small percentage of their tips go up on Techmeme.

• Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera pushed some buttons and told us that 19 submitters have had 91 tips hit Techmeme in the last week.
• We went through each day's archive at noon and midnight PST and were able to identify 66 tipped stories contributed by 14 people.
• Atul Arora submitted 52% of those headlines, giving him a 15% success rate.
• Mrinal Desai submitted 21% of the tipped headlines, giving him a 16% success rate.
• Jeff Crites (BrickandClick), the community manager at Army.mil, submitted 5% of the tipped stories we found.
• That means that 78% of the tipped stories on Techmeme came from 3 out of 110 people who submitted tips over the last 7 days.

Those seem to us like numbers that could discourage most people from submitting tips, but maybe discouragement is unwarranted. Rivera says that the top tippers have a lot more visibility than they have influence. Many of the stories they submit would have made it on to the site anyway because they are from major news outlets whose big stories get discussed on other blogs already - that's the primary way that stories have always hit Techmeme.

Indeed Atul Arora acknowledges this. In an email this afternoon he told us:

WSJ & NY Times push articles to wsj.com/tech and nytimes.com/tech late in the evening PST. You can always tip these articles and have your name show up on techmeme. I am guilty of doing so a number of times. Even if I don't tip some of these articles will show up on Techmeme because sites like NYTimes/WSJ are probably trusted sources for Techmeme. I am sure Gabe and Megan do look out for such behavior and make sure that this method of tipping is not abused.

Gabe and Megan are watching out for abuses of the system. Rivera says the best tips are to relatively obscure sites that Techmeme wouldn't have found otherwise and points to a number of cases where that's exactly what Atul and Desai have done.

Is This System Good for the Media Getting Tips?

We wonder though, whether the system really is proving effective at Techmeme. 110 people posting tips in 7 days doesn't seem like a lot to us for a site with as many readers as Techmeme has, but it's hard to know how to judge that number. For tips and hits to be so dominated by a small number of tipsters, some of whom are posting a lot of tips to news that the system would have found anyway could be discouraging to new tipsters.

"I hope people don't get that impression because the 'top' tippers actually hold no fundamental advantage," Rivera told us. He expects more people will start tipping the big stories and that will both speed up Techmeme and give those tipsters increased visibility. Neither tipping a lot nor success in tipping gives extra impact to a person's Techmeme tips in the future. "Both [Arora and Desai] also uncover somewhat more obscure things," Rivera told us. "That's where their influence is."

That's where the hope for Twitter tips lies, too. People discovering obscure news and sharing it with their favorite news outlet. Hopefully that's something that an increasing number and diversity of people will start doing. Rivera is convinced that Twitter tips are good for Techmeme, but so far we're not sure how well they're working.

"Remember, unlike Digg, Techmeme doesn't need submissions to work," Rivera adds. "So tips only serve to fill in gaps. They're a modest remedy to a modest problem. Since they help improve Techmeme a little every day, it's clear they're helpful, and I expect their benefit to grow as more people become aware of them. When you tip Techmeme, you're making a little bit of a wager in public. You're telling all of your followers that you think a story should get on Techmeme. I think that discourages many people from tipping enough that we'll never see Digg-volume submissions. But it does serve to improve the quality of the average tip."

It's early days and Twitter is an incredibly dynamic phenomenon. You can help Twitter and Techmeme become even better by adding "tip @techmeme" to the hot tech news posts you Twitter about. You can give a good story a bump on PopURLs by Tweeting "@popurls here goes the title http://example.com". Whether the practice will catch on remains to be seen.

Thanks to Scott Macdonald for the reporter birdy pic and Pat2001 for the picture of Rivera.

TweetMeme takes the TechMeme model and adapts it nicely, using Twitter as its source of news. Even the new revenue model echoes TechMeme's advertising system. We do like the democratic process it uses to find fresh new content without giving too much weight up front to authority. However, if you like that sort of thing, TweetMeme also has a leaderboard page where it tracks a spin of this concept, weighting the freshest sources first. Louis Gray posted about those features last month.

TweetMeme has not been sitting still with other refinements and features either. They recently rolled out a mobile version of their site, as well as a promotional site button and WordPress plugin.

In many ways, MicroPlaza is similar to Techmeme. But while Techmeme is built on top of RSS feeds and blogs, and derives its rankings from the link behavior of the listed blogs, MicroPlaza tracks your Twitter friends and the sites and stories they link to.

You can see the public timeline on MicroPlaza's home page, but the real power of the service is in its individualized pages.

The memetracker/link aggregator will display the most popular items within your network, but it will also display tweets from Twitter users that you don't follow yet, which makes this a great way of discovering new people to follow on Twitter.

Another cool aspect of MicroPlaza is that it allows you to see what MicroPlaza would look like for any other Twitter user. Thanks to this 'being' feature, you can easily see what's hot in somebody else's network.

Tribes

The idea of organizing your Twitter friends into different tribes is great (just think about how useful the 'Group' feature in TweetDeck is), though this is also the only area where MicroPlaza's execution is somewhat less than ideal. If you follow a lot of users, grouping them can become rather tedious, as you can only see a few of your Twitter friends per page (up to 25), and finding them is hard, as they are not organized alphabetically. While this effort is definitely rewarded, we hope that MicroPlaza will find a way to make this feature a bit easier to use in the future.

Retweeting

MicroPlaza, of course, also makes retweeting an even more important aspect of the Twitter ecosystem. This, however, can also bias your stream if you follow users who are being retweeted frequently. To avoid this, it would be nice if MicroPlaza allowed you to block certain users.

Verdict

MicroPlaza is a very interesting and well designed service (except for the problem with the 'tribes' feature we mentioned above). If you follow a lot of users on Twitter, it is almost impossible to keep up with the discussions. Unless you are constantly looking at your Twitter stream, you inevitably miss out on some great links and stories. General Twitter memetrackers like TwitScoop are great if you want to get a feeling for what the hot topics on Twitter in general are, but thanks to MicroPlaza, you can now get a more personalized and relevant view of the stories and links that are being passed around in your own network.

MicroPlaza has promised to send us a number of beta invites in the course of the week. Just send an email to 'microplaza AT frederic.otherinbox.com' and we will send one to you as soon as we get them.

If you would like to follow us on Twitter, here is a list with the accounts of all of our writers.

McCarthy tends the gears of Techmeme, makes sure the content on the site remains of high quality and helps ensure the inclusion of new and important voices. It sounds like an awesome job and one that has probably never existed before - a half woman, half robot, news gathering machine. How can you get your blog on Techmeme? What's in the future for the site? We asked Megan in the following interview.

Marshall Kirkpatrick: What do you do all day? I imagine you standing next to one of the most awesome news discovery machines available, tending it, making sure it keeps running smoothly, and looking out beyond its reaches to feed it things it hasn't gotten to yet itself. Is that an accurate picture?

Megan McCarthy: That is fairly accurate, actually. I make sure that the news on Techmeme represents an accurate, current, and full overview of what's happening in technology right now. So, that's trimming back stories that aren't relevant, adding in viewpoints that ought to be heard, etc.

Marshall: Can you tell us a little bit about your personal background?

Megan: My personal background is a little varied. Prior to [writing for] Valleywag, I bounced around a few different jobs and places and never really found a niche. I lived in Hawaii for a few years, had various office drone jobs and other gigs to pay the bills (Nanny, bartender, coffee server). But I loved following technology and reading about what was happening in silicon valley - and I've been a news junkie since I was young.

News Selection and Twitter Tips on Techmeme

Marshall: So, did your coming on board "break" the "objectivity" of the site?

Megan: Techmeme is biased and has been so for a while. If you read Gabe's post announcing the addition of an editor, he makes that point.

What do you think, though? What changes have you noticed since I joined?

Marshall: I have noticed no changes to story selection, perhaps less wonky stuff. I've always considered Techmeme a very reliable source of news and I think you're doing a good job continuing that tradition - but there were certainly some people who grumbled about the human touch being formally introduced, an editor.

Megan: I think some of those people might grumble about anything.

Marshall: How can new bloggers get indexed on Techmeme?

Megan: We just introduced a program where people can tip relevant posts to us through Twitter. Anyone can tip any post they think is relevant to us.

Marshall: How is the new Twitter tips program working out? I see a lot of stories go up with thanks to Twitter, quite a lot - is it changing the face of the site substantially? Changing the content?

I see a handful of people getting thanks over and again, I imagine there's limited participation so far but how does the algorithm determine whose tips to accept and whose not to?

Also, a lot of people are sending tips regarding their own stories - is that ok? Even mainstream media outlets.

Megan: I don't think it's changing the content overall. Many of the stories that are tipped are ones which are worthy of a Techmeme headline. Not everything that gets tipped to us gets on the site. There are two situations that I can think of where the tip program does affect the content: It can help surface breaking stories faster, and if there are two similar stories from different outlets and someone cares enough to tip a certain one, that will probably effect which one ends up as a headline on Techmeme.

As for people tipping their own stories... personally I'm not completely opposed to it. If a writer has a breaking story that he or she wants to let us know right away, that's a good way to do it. But, they should keep in mind that their twitter handle will be credited with tipping us to the story. If "Thanks: Marshall" showed up next to every Techmeme headline you get, people might put two and two together and think that you really like your work.

To my knowledge, the identity of the person tipping the story has no effect on whether or not it will show up on the page. It's about the post itself.

Marshall: Well, if shame and loads of people saying "you're an f*ing jackass" was sufficient deterrent to anti-social behavior in social media, then...[indecipherable, record of this part of the conversation lost forever.]

Megan: Ha. Is he though?

Marshall: Oh I'm sure he is. ANYWAY. Is accuracy taken into account on Techmeme?

Megan: Accuracy is absolutely taken into account on Techmeme. That's one of my goals, anyway. If there's a post which has a lot of buzz around it, which turns out not to be true...

Marshall: What does that look like? Are you like "Steve Jobs is NOT out at Apple, I don't believe those reports! Story...gone!"

Megan: Or, a story that says "Steve Jobs NOT out at Apple" gets published next to the earlier, erroneous rumor.

Marshall: Then you yank the false story?

Megan: Either yank it or surround it with stories pointing out *why* it's false. Sometimes the false rumor becomes a story itself and yanking it can be jarring. We want our readers to be able to visit the site and know what's going on in technology - to know what people are talking about. The earlier rumor would probably be replaced as the top story by one with the correct information, but yanking it without giving our readers full context of the overall arc might be a bit jarring.

Marshall: You have to be reading a lot of these stories in great detail. What time does your work day start and end?

Megan: I start around 7:30ish and end later than that. News never stops!

The Future of Techmeme and Other Aggregators

Marshall: So, everyone wants to be an aggregator these days. All the young kids are like "mommy, I'm going to grow up to find recommended stories for an online news publisher."

What kinds of things do you foresee becoming points of leverage for content aggregators and news discovers in the future?

Megan: I think a reliable real-time web is going to have the greatest impact on aggregation services. I'd love to be able to see stories from sites as they're published, without a lag.

I hope that quality, accurate, and speedy stories get rewarded by receiving more attention - and that new voices are discovered and make the media chorus sound fuller and stronger.

You were asking me about my electric sheep dreams.

Marshall: Are you a cyborg?

Megan: Depends on my mood.

Marshall: At least between 7am and 7pm?

Megan: That sounds about right. This is super-nerdy, but reading an overwhelming amount of news is something that I rather enjoy doing.

Thanks to Megan McCarthy and Techmeme for doing this interview and doing the things they do each day - help us find the hottest conversation in technology. We appreciate it. You can find Megan on Twitter as well. Photo at top by Scott Beale

McCarthy's new job is really interesting in a number of ways. Rivera says with her addition "it really feels like the age of the news cyborg has arrived." It's also very interesting because of who McCarthy is. Most of all it's interesting because it's an absolute dream job for any tech news junky. We discuss the hire in depth over on Jobwire, our site dedicated to covering new hires in tech and new media.