A VC - Latest Comments in Techmeme: A Cautionary Tale

Re: Techmeme: A Cautionary Tale

fredwilson — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 17:15:02 -0000

Ok, it's a bad thing.

For me.

Not sure it's a bad thing for everyone though

The comments to this post suggest it isn't.

fred

Re: Techmeme: A Cautionary Tale

Sam Freedoms Controversy Blog — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 17:11:16 -0000

Dude, IT'S A BAD THING. Why don't you just say it? IT'S A BAD THING. Your last line tries to present you as some kind of a wandering bard who's just passing through and reporting on a "simply noteworthy" event when, in fact, it's like a Tyrannosaurus Rex just came and tore your ass to pieces.

Oh that's just merely my rankings being smashed to pieces and flushed down the drain by bigger entities who figured out that we were feeding on a juicy gazelle. And you got your gazelle stolen... AND THAT'S A BAD THING.

It means you have to go hunting for a new hunting grounds, or a new food source. If that's not a BAD THING relative to your online existence, please tell me what is...

Re: Techmeme: A Cautionary Tale

fredwilson — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 08:29:01 -0000

I am still reading the comments

Fred

Re: Techmeme: A Cautionary Tale

fredwilson — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 08:22:02 -0000

You are so right. The bottom of techmeme is where the good stuff always is

Fred

Re: Techmeme: A Cautionary Tale

andydavies — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 04:44:46 -0000

I guess what we need is a tracker built around what people are sharing or starring using Google Reader, perhaps also linked into the social book marking sites like delicious and Magnolia...

Re: Techmeme: A Cautionary Tale

Tech For Novices — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 03:45:16 -0000

Dear Fred and all others

We are just a small blog. Actually a nobody compared to others discussing the stuff here

But still butting in our point.....

Why cant a new blog be just created and write about some of the posts with links on techmeme or feature techmeme links in blog posts and then automatically feature on techmeme?

Why cant some one just try it out with our blog. To prove it either way ?

PS - Dear Scoble. Why dont you see our smll blog too ? In your 8000 blogs.. let us be 8001?

Re: Techmeme: A Cautionary Tale

vanelsas — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 03:16:38 -0000

Fred, I'm not so worried about TechMeme. The thing is, you need to use such boards in a way that works best for your own purposes. I hardly ever dive into the "breaking news" items on TechMeme. What Techmeme shows in an excellent way is that at least a dozen blog sites bring the same breaking news. So we are all looking at the same scoops. But, if you are willing to move past the scoops, then the real good stuff appears after the scoops. It is those guys that really know what they are talking about that start analysing what is happening. That is what I like best. And when you get interaction on those posts, new things emerge, new insights, new idea's. Just look at all the comments you get on this blog. That is what makes blogging a great thing to do. I've written about it a while back ago already if interested:
http://vanelsas.wordpress.c...

Re: Techmeme: A Cautionary Tale

Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 22:06:46 -0000

To go along with what Dasher is saying (if anyone is still reading the comments on this post) -

When insight providers move towards news providers, they get a broader readerbase, and therefore more money. This is a relatively simple transition to make, and we've seen it happen several times in the blogosphere.

On the other hand moving from news provider to insight provider proves more difficult, as author's insight tends to be far more limited in scope than what he can casually provide news about.

Re: Techmeme: A Cautionary Tale

JoeDuck — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 21:22:17 -0000

OK, I'm getting you now. Maybe I'm being naive about what makes tech tick, but I like the blend of insider views with the simplistic-but-seasoned mainstream journalism stories abuot technology you get in Forbes and Newsweek. I think those stories drive the public perception of what's up in tech, so I definitely want them included.

Re: Techmeme: A Cautionary Tale

fredwilson — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 21:09:01 -0000

That is a matter of debate and that's fine with me

Fred

Re: Techmeme: A Cautionary Tale

fredwilson — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 20:49:01 -0000

My apologies if I am ignoring you

Not intentionally

Fred

Re: Techmeme: A Cautionary Tale

fredwilson — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 20:23:01 -0000

I appreciate the new guard too but I want a mix of both and none of the papers I rejected years ago

Fred

Re: Techmeme: A Cautionary Tale

JoeDuck — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 19:23:13 -0000

Fred I'm not at all comfortable with the idea that the "old guard" does all the best blogging. I like some of their posts, but prefer some of the new voices. You seem to want a connection to the same old voices you've heard for some time. Fine, but that's what RSS is for. Thanks to TechMeme I find a lot more new voices, and I also have Gabe doing some of the human filtering for me because he's not going to run crappy blogs. Are some of the new voices writing to TechMeme? Sure, but the challenge there is not that there *appear*, which is great because good blogs are hard to find, the challenge is that this makes too much of an echo chamber. However the solution for that is more bloggers, not fewer.

Re: Techmeme: A Cautionary Tale

King Tut — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 19:21:23 -0000

"I don't think this is a bad thing, it's just worth noting."

Nahh, it is a bad thing. Trust is lost. As is in-depth analysis. The teams who write do so for the least common denominator -- the magazines (and these high-earning blogs) write for the neophyte because there are tons more of those than pros...and they write for MONEY now...not a desire to share their knowledge or love of the subject matter.

This is why I stopped reading magazines (and dislike the TechCrunches of the inet) a long time ago. Nothing more than a regurgitation of old information, crappy surface-level advice, ads, and sometimes a couple new tid-bits that can be garnered from any of the "pro" blogs you read -- and usually weeks or months before the magazines (or enterprise blogs) pick up on these new sites/concepts.

There needs to be a source of information catering to the pro. Ignoring the Joe. This source of information won't be able to take in much money and shouldn't care. Otherwise, they will do the business thing - hire teams who don't share the love, write to the masses, sell out to PR reps, corrupt the writeups to please sponsors, etc...

Re: Techmeme: A Cautionary Tale

Robert Seidman — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 19:12:52 -0000

I'd love to see a discussion on "what's most important" and whether services like TechMeme good at sussing out and correctly ranking the most important issues. On a guess I'd say they're at least pretty good in most cases compared to editors.

But the thing an editor can do that TechMeme and its ilk can't is immediately re-rank. On a guess for the broader technology sphere the most important story "right now" is that HP beat earnings. I imagine on the Washington Post, New York Times, WSJ etc technology pages, it's already the #1 listed story. On TechMem as of this writing (and I'm sure it will change) it's #4 and well below the fold.

Re: Techmeme: A Cautionary Tale

fredwilson — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 18:32:02 -0000

Thanks! I will try. Its not easy

Fred

Re: Techmeme: A Cautionary Tale

fredwilson — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 18:27:01 -0000

I appreciate the candid feedback. I wish I knew what to change to spice it back up but I don't

Fred

Re: Techmeme: A Cautionary Tale

AndyBeard — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 18:23:12 -0000

There is always Megite where you can request a meme based upon your own seeds.

My biggest problem with Techmeme is similar to yours, in that it seems to favour the big players that cover everything Technology related, compared to niche sites that have a huge amount of in depth historical knowledge such as SearchEngineLand.
SearchEngineLand does get a lot of mentions, but is rarely the lead, and as soon as Techcrunch writes about something, even a couple of days late, it immediately becomes the main focus of the story.

Re: Techmeme: A Cautionary Tale

Terry — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 16:55:32 -0000

I for one do feel your blog has become boring. I've felt that way for some time now, but I still visit it to see if you have anything interesting to say from time to time. I used to visit every day.

Re: Techmeme: A Cautionary Tale

Dasher — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 16:43:05 -0000

BTW, I dont' need curators to manage my blog readins. There are only a handful blogs that provide great insights and I can just go to them directly and read them at my leisure.

Re: Techmeme: A Cautionary Tale

Dasher — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 16:35:20 -0000

I think Fred is really trying to say this.

Tech blogs are of two types: news providers and insight providers. I know every blog claims to be both, but it is easy to figure out which is which. I personally like to spend more time on the insight providers (as it is pretty easy to find the latest news and scoops on the internet). The blogs fred "grew" up on used to provide great insights and see trends early. But now they have just become news sites that provide "exclusive" scoops. How many of techmeme's leaders provide great insights and analysis? Not many. It is the leaderboard of news blogs.

Providing great insights is a difficult thing to do. You simply can't throw bodies at the problem like the news blogs do. Successful single person blogs provide great insights.

Fred, as long as you provide useful insights (of a VC with a clue) we will come to your blog.

Re: Techmeme: A Cautionary Tale

BillSeitz — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 16:26:05 -0000

I find that TailRank does a better job of filtering, but perhaps it filters too much to the people I already read...

Re: Techmeme: A Cautionary Tale

TechMerkin — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 16:13:02 -0000

Good post Fred!

I think TechMeme is salvageable, however, I proposed a solution here:

http://techmerkin.wordpress...

Cheers, TM

Re: Techmeme: A Cautionary Tale

Scobleizer — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 15:47:41 -0000

insomniamg: there's only so much information one human being can consume, you're right. But in my case it's about 800 feeds which include about 6,000 bloggers (since one of my feeds, blogs.msdn.com, includes 4,000 or so Microsoft employees). That comes out to about 2,000 items a day that I'm reading and I'm putting out about 1,200 items a month. All manually without any algorithms.

Now, look at FeedHeads, an application over on Facebook. I have it on my profile and it aggregates about 1,000 people who are using Google or NewsGator feed readers to "share" favorite items. The app itself is often down, but points to a new kind of app that could come about: one that is as good as TechMeme in speed and is better than Digg in quality.

Anyway, Web popularity is a really tough thing to do. If it were easy to do, TechMeme would have seen more variants by now.

There are lots of ways to get discovered if you have a great blog, though. If you really think you have a great tech blog and aren't getting discovered, I'd sure love to hear about it. My phone number and email address are on my blog at http://scobleizer.com .

Re: Techmeme: A Cautionary Tale

Ian Lamont — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 15:15:20 -0000

There are opportunities for alternative aggregators. At Computerworld, we've created a "human-powered" blog aggregator called Tech Dispenser (techdispenser.com), and also have a daily roundup of tech blogs called IT Blogwatch (blogs.computerworld.com/blo.... Both use editorial intelligence to make their top picks and links. While these services can't keep up with Techmeme in terms of the number of blogs that are monitored and the frequency of updates, they are better than the algorithm-powered aggregators at screening out recycled press releases and other low-value content, while highlighting obscure blogs that may never appear in Techmeme.