I think TechMeme is great, but something tells me that Alexa wildly over-estimates its actual traffic. If you think about it, tech bloggers are heavy Alexa-weighters and they skew most tech blogs. Seeing how so many rely and link to TechMeme.com you can imagine that TechMeme gets a favorable bounce. It’s all good, it’s definitely deserved: the site is efficient and a great source of great new content. I do sometimes wish that it penalize some of the me-too blogs that simply rehash what others post, but hey, that’s where your brain should kick in and determine where to pay more attention to.
But I also think - like most people - that the intricate and intuitive way that it indexes and organizes news is very interesting, and it has the potential to really dominate across many categories, not just tech.
Some people have said “TechMeme is what Google News should be,” and while I might sound drunk when I say this, TechMeme’s modus operandi on some days reminds me of Google back in 2000, when you sort of knew it had a lot of potential.
Its founder Gabe Rivera has applied the TechMeme mojo to Entertainment (well, smut anyway), politics and baseball, and he explained to me a couple of months ago why he did not open it up to more categories. For a second I thought Gabe wasn’t a business guy but his rationale proved to me how savvy he actually was, for we apply the domain specific vertical search engine methodology at MetaMojo.com to a myriad of categories even though only a handful yield really good results: health, music, film, video games, travel and a couple more…
Focus Ash, focus Ash… Anyway, when I see that the once-upon-a-time much ballyhooed Topix.net just/finally cracked the Top 20 news sites according to Hitwise, I wonder why TechMeme does not get more aggressive and really kick ass in all-things-news.
Frankly, the site should remain independent. My theory is that Topix.net slowed down once the major newspapers invested in the company. Alternatively, while the hard working guys at Topix.net deserved a pause, maybe they paced themselves a bit too much once they partially cashed out. Who knows. That last comment wasn’t a knock, it’s simply to say maybe it’s not all the newspapers fault.
Whatever the case, the argument could be made that TechMeme should remain independent to avoid it from becoming skewed in its “coverage” but also so it could execute anywhere it wants to.
In the past, I’ve encouraged TechMeme.com to launch a similar product for comments, this would effectively suck out a lot of traffic from the usual suspects such as TechCrunch, PaidContent, Valleywag, GigaOm and company and get the “conversation” going on his site. It’s a pretty ballsy move, but let’s face it, if Rivera really wanted to do, he could turn the tables around and become the next Michael Arrington… just that he does not need to work 18 hour days (or who knows, maybe he does).
Today, I realized another thing that Gabe should do (welcome to “open source management” - I guess, to be filed under “advice you didn’t ask for / assuming you care”) is to develop a TechMeme Grid that would allow readers to:
- list all of the posts that have been indexed from a given source (say you like what this blog has to say on topic X, you can then jump around and read other things I’ve written, and then from there jump onto other blogs, if you wish).
- list all of the posts that have been indexed under tags, be it company, or topics.
If Gabe did that, overnight his sites would grow by leaps and bounds. I know what you’re thinking, Topix does some of that, and Technorati does some of the rest, but TechMeme does the tracking of “conversations” much better, so it could move into the other areas quite well and really suck a lot of traffic, and send out more.
These are just peripheral things he could do to really turn it up a couple of notches. As I see things, while there are plenty of other social news services - be it aggregators, “memetrackers” or bookmarking tools - I repeat once again that social news is really just getting started. I guess by way of disclosure I should also say that we have a social news/bookmarking tool ready to go, and we have search technology on hand. At some point we might launch into the space, but if you have not noticed we’re busy trying to kick ass in online video content, and a few other fields.
But I really hope that Gabe and TechMeme remain independent and don’t succumb to the tempting offers to cash out, because the more I think about news, the more I think of search in 2000… will TechMeme (or Topix) become the king of the mountain? Who knows… the company has many challenges and obstacles in scaling. And frankly, money alone or more resources won’t do, it needs some kind of raison d’etre beyond the tech crowd, basically.
But right now, to find the answer to most news related queries, it remains a crapshoot, and indeed that’s quite reminiscent of search back in 2000… in other words, that spells a massive opportunity for both Topix, TechMeme, Technorati and all things in between… which come to think of it makes it very, very odd that Greylock just plunked $8M into Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson’s Revision 3, when they should be honing in on Digg.
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June 27th, 2007 at 2:10 am
Hmm, my intuition is that the market for plain old passive news reading is a lot bigger than that for the searching/drilling down/exploring type of news consumption. Might be wrong. Would love to hear pro/con arguments…