Gabe Rivera, 34, working completely on his own in his home in the Bay Area, has created Techmeme, what many bloggers, reporters and editors consider the most important tech news aggregation site. And, he is about to transform the news and blogging world with new aggregation sites for national politics, gossip and major league baseball.
In some ways, this similar to Google News, in that it is an automated system to track and index news of the moment. However, unlike Google News, Techmeme pulls and organizes many sources of news, notably a rich variety of blogs.
I met Gabe in LA earlier this month where he agreed to speak with Beet.TV in a rare television interview. In our chat, explains a little bit of his secret sauce: Headlines are important. Also key is the site’s function as an "automated link blogger" — organizing stories that are being linked to in the blogesphere. (Scoble explains this below.)
In creating this post, I’ve ask for comments on Techmeme from top bloggers. Here’s what they told Beet.TV
Dan Farber Editor-in-Chief, ZDNet
Better than any other site, TechMeme helps bring some order out of the chaos of content on Web 2.0 topics.
Peter Rojas, Editor-in-Chief, Engadget
Let’s just say that TechMeme is one of the first sites I check in the
morning when I get up — and I keep checking it all day until I go to
bed.
Robert Scoble, Scobleizer
TechMeme looks at more than a thousand of the world’s top tech bloggers and measures their attention behavior – what they blog about, link to, comment on – and presents that as the most interesting news of the minute (it updates every few minutes). I find it invaluable in keeping up with what’s hot in the technology industry and it has less noise than, say, Digg, which is counting votes from more than a million participants. TechMeme is the only site I feel compelled to check every few hours.
Gabe told me he does everything himself except his taxes. He is planning on hiring soon, though. That’s a good idea, I mean can he really do this all alone?
The one thing that bugs him are the legions of angry bloggers who don’t make it onto Techmeme.
— Andy Plesser
Techmeme
Gabe Rivera
Scobleizer
Robert Scoble
