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.

In this heated election season, Memeorandum is a huge asset for following politics online, but it's hard for the casual observer to get the most out of the conversation by merely visiting the site. Memeorandum Colors adds a whole new layer of clarity and sophistication to the site by color-coding algorithmically categorized liberal and conservative blogs.

Memeorandum, like Techmeme, tracks hot conversations in the blogosphere by seeing who is linking to whom. Every 5 minutes these sites check to see what the break out topics are and then organize them by link-hub and conversation links. See the screenshot I took a few minutes ago.

Memeorandum Colors takes the history of what 50,000 blogs indexed by Memeorandum have linked to and analyzes them for patterns. Schachter and Baio found that there were two clear groups of blogs that tended to link together. Presumably they looked at them and determined that one group was conservative and the other, liberal. Interestingly, the two ran the same algorithm on the blogs in Techmeme and found that the blogs there are split into two groups as well - business vs. technology.

The Greasemonkey script then color codes each blog in shades of red or blue, depending on how consistently they've linked with the conservative or liberal pack in the past. The end result is that when you load the Memeorandum site, you can see which kinds of blogs are clustering around a common node, which story nodes are of such general interest that they cross party lines and which brave conservative blogs step out of the norm and link to liberal sources and vice versa. This author was just complaining yesterday about how hard it is to find out what liberal blogs have to say about conservative conversations on Memeorandum without a lot of knowledge about who the leading blogs are in each camp. Problem solved!

This is an awesome example of the kinds of magic services that can be created by analyzing aggregate data around user generated content. We love this kind of stuff.

If you've never used Greasemonkey before, we assure you - it's much easier than it sounds! Just download the official Firefox plug-in and then click on any Greasemonkey script link to install it. Honestly, two or three mouse clicks and you're cooking with gas. If it helps you can watch our screencast How to Start Using Greasemonkey in Under 5 Minutes.

For an in depth technical discussion of how Memorandum Colors was created and to grab the Memeorandum Colors script, see Baio's fabulous blog Waxy.org. I'm off to see what moderate conservative blogs have to say about reports of extreme hostility at Republican political rallies!

Polymeme is an ambitious project and it goes up against more established meme trackers like Tailrank, Megite, Techmeme and Memeorandum, as well as the broad range of social news sites like Digg, Newsvine, and Yahoo! Buzz.

Hybrid Model

Polymeme is a hybrid system. Its front page is determined by a group of editors who pick the most interesting stories to be featured on the site from the pool of popular stories in the blogosphere as determined by Polymeme's memetracker back-end. This memetracker is never fully exposed to users, but the 'Popular Memes' section is determined algorithmically.

Because Polymeme only has a limited pool of editors, it can take some time for a story to appear on the front page. As Evgeny pointed out to us, though, having editors look for stories that would otherwise stay off the radar is 'a feature, not a bug.' Also, Polymeme argues that while the tech blogosphere moves very fast, other blogging verticals move a lot slower. In general, the site refreshes every 2-3 hours.

In many respects, this approach does resemble a newspaper or journal more than a memetracker - but maybe that doesn't come as a surprise, given Evgeny's background as a journalist.

Features

While the site works very well without creating an account, logging into the site allows users to personalize the news selection and create personalized RSS feeds or email alerts. What Polymeme doesn't do is create a personalized feed based on keywords or on a user's OPML file like Megite does. For now, the personalization options stop at choosing topics from a menu of different sections of the site .

Polymeme's Buzz section is another interesting feature of the site. Buzz is basically a tag-cloud interface to Polymeme based on the tags automatically created by OpenCalais, and while it broke once or twice during testing, it does present an interesting way for browsing blogs.

Verdict

Where Polymeme really shines is in the selection of blogs it tracks, which is extremely wide and global in its scope. Looking at the articles featured on Polymeme today, there is very little overlap with those of other memetrackers.

Polymeme is an interesting experiment. The hybrid model of tracking memes but also employing editors might seem a bit strange at first, but so far, the editors have done a good job at highlighting interesting stories that did mostly fly under the radar of the traditional memetrackers.

Whether Polymeme can help us break out of the echo chamber (or whether it just creates a bigger echo chamber) remains to be seen - for now, it's an experiment worth taking a look at.

It's already proven to be a great way to make more informed purchases in the periodical section of your local bookstore, I look forward to using it now to find gems buried in the flood of content available on these social media sites.

Review writers sign up with their Paypal addresses for payment, then claim "assignments" by source or topic area. Up to three reviewers can claim an assignment and each assignment has a deadline before which the review must be submitted. The assignment desk shows a fair amount of reviewer activity so far, though see further discussion of user adoption below.

The whole Brijit site is very elegant in its design and user experience. I love the ability to view the highest rated business stories in the past week, for example. I really like the whole site, in fact. Brijit is one of my favorite services that's launched in the last year. If you're an intellectually curious person who subscribes to too many magazines and doesn't find time to read the best articles, or who likes a good national newspaper and a cup of coffee on the weekends - I think you'll like Brijit too.

The addition of online social media sites is a smart one. Brijit says they will use an algorithm to discover the most interesting articles and videos to assign to reviewers. Bringing the Brijit community of well-read smarties into an editorial position relative to YouTube videos, for example, sounds like a great way to discover the really high-value videos on the site.

Seeking the Nerd Network Effect

The one down-side to Brijit is that it will be a real challenge to grow. Reading a full article on a time schedule and writing a thoughtful review, even if only 100 words, is not an easy task. That's why sites like YouTube, Digg and Techmeme leverage the simplest actions possible by their users to determine what's hot. Brijit would be a much better site if its userbase was much larger and there were multiple reviews on each item, as the company clearly hopes will happen. The company told us it saw "40% month-over-month growth for the first half of April versus the first half March" and that user growth is "accelerating." That's good news.

That said, even with small numbers of users it's a fun site to use. Small numbers of users will not sustain the kind of growth that will make $5 payments per review viable over the long term, but with enough growth and presumably some high-end advertising in the future - hopefully this site can thrive.

Below is a widget displaying the most recent items on Brijit that I've saved for later reading, just one of a number of nice little features you'll find on the site.

Today RSS aficionado Rogers Cadenhead announced the launch of a project aimed to solve the echo chamber problem. Called Meme13, we'd like to respectfully submit that the site is fundamentally flawed and we'd like to offer an alternative solution.

Meme13 tracks the newest additions to the Techmeme Leader board, the list of sites most likely to appear as anchor links for discussion in a random sampling of Techmeme's history. The service then displays the feeds of the 13 most recent additions to the leader board, spliced together on one page.

Cadenhead says he's been tracking new additions to the leader board for the last 10 weeks and each addition to Meme13 tends to stick around for two weeks before a 13 new additions kicks it off the list of most recent. In other words, Meme13 is introducing one new site on average each day.

I found Meme13 via Steven Hodson.

The Problems With Meme13

In other words, Meme13 introduces you to a new member of the echo-chamber elite every day. How is this a solution to the echo-chamber problem people complain about? By definition the Leader Board is a list of the 100 most discussed tech blogs on the web. If you want to use Techmeme to discover new, trusted sources that are still outside the regular suspects - there are better ways to do it. (See below, for one example.)

Indeed the current Meme13 list is made up of several News.com blogs, a Fortune blog, Problogger, Jeremiah Owyang, Thomas Hawk, etc. Much as those folks are due a lot of respect, saying they are the solution to the echo chamber problem seems silly. It seems entirely counter-intuitive, in fact.

A further problem that some bloggers are liable to object to is that Meme13 displays the full text of their RSS feeds when they are available. While debate rages about such practices, I don't know why anyone would start up a new project and make a decision like that. It's probably not too big a deal, but it does seem like peeing in some one's pool without good reason to do so.

One Better Way to Eliminate the Echo Chamber

As an alternative to what Meme13 is doing, we built the following RSS feed. It delivers links to each new site that gets discussed on Techmeme, but filters out duplicates so that you'll never see the same site twice and they don't have to be big stars to make the list.

We used the TechMeme River, Dapper, FeedDigest and FeedBurner to put it together. If you'd like to subscribe here's the link: Techmeme's Newest Sources.

Here's a little bit of what's in the feed right now, though clearly the feed is busy discovering some big sites for the first time.

Deeper Issues: Lay Off the Little Blogs!

I do want to take this opportunity to call into question the basic assumption that "supporting links" on Techmeme aren't worth reading. I believe they very much are. For one thing, by listing both commonly linked to coverage of a story and other participants in the discussion, Techmeme lets readers select what kind of perspective they want to read on a topic. Look at this current sliver of the site, for example.

Looking at that post, I know from my familiarity with these sources that if I want to read a quick news hit from a tools-centric perspective, the Download Squad link is where I want to go. (DS isn't small, they're at least as big a blog as we are.) If I want to read a more analytical take on the news item, with a particular focus on the context of innovation online in general - I want to read Sarah Perez's post here on RWW. If I want to read a review by a proud up-and-coming blogger, who's friends with the circle of up and comers that have rallied around Readburner but who's also not afraid to call it like she sees it, then I'll read Corvida's coverage at SheGeeks. If I want to read something detailed and referencing a number of other bleeding edge RSS related tools that I may or may not have used before - then Louis Gray is the link that I want to follow.

On almost every story on Techmeme you can find unique perspectives in the supporting links. Those people participating in discussions quite often have something important to add and there's no reason to disparage them for talking about subjects that are clearly of general interest, even if they aren't the first or most authoritative.

I remember when I first got on Techmeme, it was so exciting! My wonderful friend Barb Dybwad linked to me on AOL's Social Software Weblog, where I later went to work. When I got on Techmeme, hundreds of people clicked through and visited my little personal blog. It was a big day for me.

Some of today's up and coming bloggers are tomorrow's heavy hitting blog journalists, so don't be a jerk and call their posts on Techmeme worthless.

I you feel the need to get out of the echo chamber, but you do like the fast meme tracking capabilities of Techmeme - give our filtered feed a try. Try reading the supporting links on Techmeme too, though. They may not be on the Leader Board, but they've often got a lot to say that's worth reading.

Here's a simplified diagram of how it works:

Brewer told ReadWriteWeb that "I created TwitLinks based on the overwhelming amount of information that is posted on twitter." He said that he found himself "more interested in the links that people I didn't know personally published over their individual twitters, so to remove this noise the idea of twitlinks was born." Brewer says that TwitLinks is also available as an RSS feed, JSON, iPhone and Google Gadget.

Of course, removing the noise is what a lot of RSS and API powered mashups try to do these days, because there is so much noise in our RSS Readers, social networks, etc. Twitlinks will no doubt be accused of elitism, as Techmeme often is. But in reality Twitlinks looks like a neat app that delivers very fast tidbits of information from tech bloggers. It's not an earth-shattering app, but does a very effective job. It may well become a 'check multiple times a day' site for me, as Techmeme is.

Included are the ReadWriteWeb bloggers: rww (me), marshallk, catone, sarahintampa, alexiskold.

That may be true, but some people would like to see a little more attention given to those other two-thirds.

But where else can you get the current tech news besides Techmeme? Quite a few places, actually:

Hacker News: When Mike Arrington mentioned that the little-known site, Hacker News, was his first morning read, the site received an influx of traffic. Part Digg, part forum, the site hasn't been compromised despite all the attention. It's still a great way to find, read, vote for, and discussion interesting stories.

Elite Tech News Reddit: Back in January, blogger MG Siegler was testing out Reddit's "Create Your Own Reddit" beta feature. He created the "Elite Tech News Reddit," which now functions as sort of an "elite" Digg. Currently, he and other bloggers like Steven Hodson, Frederic Lardinois, Louis Gray, Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins, Jason Kaneshiro, and Tony Hung use the site to vote up and down the latest tech stories they find interesting. While big blogs still appear on the site, it's more of a Techmeme-turned-Mahalo look at the news.

RSSMeme: Lest we forget, there's always RSSMeme, the site that highlights the top shared items in your Google RSS Reader. Although, due to the fact that the site is dependent on people reading and sharing stories, this isn't the best site for finding "breaking" news, but it does show what's popular. You can even customize it to show you a certain number of shares from a certain timeframe, too. Just remember, your vote only counts if you register your Google Reader shared feed.

FriendFeed: Love it or hate it, but FriendFeed is the current social media darling. If you're using the service, you can use this Greasemonkey script to filter FriendFeed by service. Assuming you're following some active users, you could filter to just show Google Reader items, for example. This gives you a nice, personalized selection of the news. An honorable mention goes to the FriendFeed Top 100 - which showed the hottest links for March, 2008, but a service that provided this info on a more regular basis would be better.

Techsted: A recent email alerted me to newcomer, Techsted. I can't say I love it, but I like their idea  of categorizing stories as Dealings, Launches, etc. There just needs to be more categories and it should be better organized. Still, the site has a neat "Designer's Stuff" section which could appeal to that niche as well as a "B-List," where you can find the hottest stories from the non-Techmeme set.

Tailrank: Good ol' Tailrank. At one time, a Techmeme competitor, Tailrank hasn't gotten much attention since last year, when a brief outage made news because no one seemed to notice. Tailrank still links to the blogosphere, but the news there seems stale. So it's another place to see what's going on, but don't expect it to break news.

TechWatching: Yet another Techmeme clone, this one a weekend project at best. The site's redeeming feature is search, which lets you search for terms appearing in the most read blogs for the past 3 months, month, 24 hours, etc. The site's creator notes that he's kind of busy right now, volunteering in Bangladesh, so if anything goes "awry" so be it. OK then.

Social News: Of course, you can get your tech news from social news sites like Digg and Mixx, but Mixx seems to have a slight edge in getting breaking news stories to the homepage faster, since Digg's complicated algorithm often means stories have to acquire hundreds of diggs to make front page. However, in sheer numbers, Digg still rules the social news arena.

Conclusion

After reviewing the alternatives, it seems to me that Techmeme's popularity is due to the simple fact that it does it best. For breaking tech news, there isn't really a better option...at least not yet.

Where do you go to get your tech news? Let us know in the comments.

Update: Marshall's story on Popurls makes me think that should be on this list, too! ]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/breaking_the_techmeme_habit.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/breaking_the_techmeme_habit.php Products Fri, 04 Apr 2008 13:46:00 -0800 Sarah Perez Vicito News is a new personalized news aggregation service that operates over instant messenger using an IM robot. The service currently works with AIM, Google Talk, and Windows Live Messenger. Vicito is something akin to Google News alerts for IM -- you tell the service what to watch for, and it updates you at preset intervals via instant messenger when it finds new news matching your query.

I told Vicito to track stories related to "baseball" and this afternoon I compared the results to those from SportsSpyder's MLB page. Not surprisingly, they were both dominated by news about the trade of Johan Santana -- baseball's top pitcher -- to the New York Mets. Somewhat surprisingly, though, I actually found Vicito's news to be more varied. Beyond Satana I was getting stories about Roger Clemens visits the Astros training camp, pitcher Andy Pettitte, and Major Leaue Baseball's umpire background check policy that were nowhere to be found amid the Santana noise (or were buried) on SportsSpyder.

Tracking "yankees" news on Vicito.

A lot of that might have to do with the source list. Vocito right now is drawing from 750 large and mainstream news sources that cover the gamut in terms of topic. SportsSpyder, on the other hand, is drawing from specialized sources that deal exclusively with baseball -- so certainly the overlap and number of reporters covering the same big story will be greater.

But the experience does highlight one major problem with single stream aggregators like these: there is a lot repetition. Because Vicito is just posting a river of news that matches your search query, you end up getting the same story from multiple source. Unlike with meme-style aggregators like Google News or Techmeme (or perhaps, more on topic, Ballbug), which group similar stories, Vicito's stream loses some appeal once you've seen the same story 5 times.

Nat Burke, founder of Vicito, is aware that eventually some sort of filtering will be necessary. "As we continue to grow our source volume, having something to weed out the noise will become essential," he told me. "What eventual form that takes is up in the air at this point."

Even with the noise problem, though, Vicito remains a useful service for getting breaking, topically filtered, news updates over IM. If instant messenger is your preferred method of communication, then you might find some utility in Vicito. Vicito is free to use, with a premium for-pay package that ups the limit on the number of news stories you can receive per update and how often.