You never read tech news, do you? Good. Somehow, the story of the accidental early release of a Facebook iPad app everyone was expecting is threatening to turn into a week-long saga. Make it stop! This is the most boring shit ever.
Since 2005, semi-automatic news aggregator TechMeme has become a front page for Silicon Valley and its leaderboard rankings a status obsession for writers. Now comes Mediagazer, the similarly cyborg compilation of media news. Egos are already trembling.
When asked how he keeps up "with the latest tech news when there are so many blogs," Times editor David Gallagher immediately cited TechMeme, a direct competitor of Blogrunner, as "one of my favorite sites." Although the Times serves Blogrunner results from the front of Gallagher's own section, the editor didn't plug…
Twitter is the ideal medium to express your own idiocy. Dan Abrams denounces the mainstream media which gave birth to his career, a Google-enriched entrepreneur eats its free lunch, and Alan Meckler discovers Twitter:
Online aggregators are financial vampires sucking the lifeblood out of the news business! You know — evil digital upstarts like the Wall Street Journal, CNN, and the New York Times.
Anyone have a handkerchief? What? Oh, nothing in particular — just the tearjerking phenomenon of seemingly intelligent people like Jake Tapper, Rachel Sklar, and Paul Carr spending so much time sharing so little on Twitter:
Today's sweetest tweets: CNET's Caroline McCarthy got ready to don a Snuggie. Valleywag alumna Megan McCarthy (no relation) dreamed of Atlantis. David Gregory of Meet the Press succumbed to Twitter peer pressure. And more!
Wall Street is melting down. But from sampling the thoughts of tech bloggers on Techmeme, an automated news aggregator, you'd think that the biggest story today was a redesign of WSJ.com. One couldn't ask for a clearer sign of the Valley's superficial obsession with user interfaces and online advertising. With Lehman…
A News.com reporter covered the death toll in 28 words before spending the next 613 trying to figure out if the recent earthquake in China near the manufacturing hub of Chengdu would hurt multinational technology companies. Which is only slightly less tasteless than the conversation which broke out on tech news…
Good news for Web 2.0 embedded reporter Sarah Lacy: Compared to Gene Simmons's sad, sad sex video and rumors of Jimmy Wales's misbehavior, most of the planet couldn't care less about your Mark Zuckerberg interview trainwreck in Austin over the weekend. In fact, hardly anyone wants to read about the South by…
Who needs journalists, really? That's what Business Wire argues. Warren Buffett, the billionaire CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, picked up Business Wire in 2006. He claims not to be tech-savvy, but this investment suggests otherwise. Press releases distributed by Business Wire are picked up directly by services like…
Scoops are important to journalists. But do readers care? Some writers persist in thinking so. I can't remember ever seeing such backbiting over a humdrum funding announcement: Kara Swisher of AllThingsD scooped everyone last Friday with a rumor that Slide, Max Levchin's Web widget maker, was raising a big funding…
Yes, there's some truly bad man's-inhumanity-to-man stuff going down in Kenya. No, Robert Scoble and his echo chamber are not morally obliged to figure out some tech angle and post about it. The fallacy made by political correctards is that if Robert Scoble doesn't blog about something, he either doesn't know or…
Attention tech PR people: Here's the conclusion of reluctant Valleywag content provider Robert Scoble's two-part, 37-minute whiteboard orgy on how to get your next press release to the top of Techmeme, the most important site on the Internet. Ready? Here it is: Take Scoble to dinner. Boom, top of Techmeme. It's that…
Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera's new WeSmirch Leaderboard repurposes the software that runs his technology A-list to track the top 100 celebrity gossip sites. WeSmirch replaces boring TechCrunch and The New York Times with the far more salacious TMZ and New York Post. Skimming for Britney videos turns out to be a lot…
We like numbers! A-list tech blogger Robert Scoble drops some informal traffic stats for clickthroughs to his site from popular Web hubs. Dave Winer also posts a few. Compared to Valleywagger Jordan Golson's 5 million hits from Matt Drudge, the numbers disappoint. They'll send bloggers backpedaling to boasts that…
How overrated is blog-post-ranking site Techmeme, so much in this week's news? Scoring the top slot on the site's front door is good for bragging rights if you're a tech blogger. But if you value pageviews more than props, here's the hard truth: Techmeme's prize position will only send around 1,000 direct…
"Yeah, I suppose you fooled Techmeme about your sincerity. Note that you also fooled Fred Wilson and Josh Kopelman in the process. Training your readers to doubt you can be risky. Sometimes you want your posts taken at face value, e.g. those insisting your company is succeeding." Gabe Rivera, founder of blog…
To the frustration of his less-savvy and overserious critics, Internet entrepreneur and professional gadfly Jason Calacanis has mastered the API for online tech-news tracker Techmeme. [Calacanis.com]
One could say many things about blog-tracker Technorati and its founder, David Sifry, but the worst charge, I think, to make, is that he helped popularize a delusion particularly congenial to the self-involved world of the Valley: That links to your website somehow matter more than traffic. A newly hired CEO may fix…
