Duncan Riley of Inquisitr has highlighted it again and again that TechMeme, the once destination of choice to find latest and hottest news in the blogosphere, is biased. The problem that we want to point today is that even though Startup Meme covers technology and startup news, it never shows up on TechMeme, not as a source of news and not even in the discussion links. This was not always the case, we used to show up on the site back in the times when Gabe hadn’t sold his soul to the devil.
Although we have experienced it ourselves numerous times, but we decided to not rant about it publicly. Have we done anything about it ? Well when it initially happened, I wrote a couple of emails to Gabe asking the reason behind this strange behavior. Of course I never heard from him and as a result just gave up on the idea.
So why complain now ? Well a couple of days back as I went on TechMeme I once again saw Startup Meme’s stories in the discussion of some Headlines so I thought (wrongly of course) that we are back on the site once again. This joy was short lived as whatever that was, it wasn’t permanent and Startup Meme is banned or blocked or whatever from TechMeme once again. Having covered 40 news items today with some of them being on TechMeme currently, TechMeme’s algorithms (if there are some algorithms there in the first place) are acting as if we don’t exist.
What does this tells us ? From this fiasco its blatantly clear that TechMeme actually relies on human editing, which results in a site showing up on the aggregator, if and when the human editor feels like it.
Can something be done about it ? Well just forget about it, its a lost cause. TechMeme is broken beyond repair.
Just wanted to say that Startup Meme features regularly on TechWatching (my meme-tracker). Click my name to check it out.
As I understand it, techmeme does use a human editor, hence the business about Gabe hiring a few days ago. (see http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2008/11/15/media-geeks-techmeme-is-hiring/). TechWatching requires human input too, but evidently takes a much different approach than TechMeme’s.
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