Editor’s note: Today, being a news junkie requires not just the ability to keep up with hundreds of breaking stories a day, but the ability to redistribute those stories to your followers and news sites. To get some insight into the modern news junkie, we asked Mrinal Desai to share with us how he screens the news in the guest post below. Desai is the co-founder of CrossLoop, but some of you may recognize him more from Twitter or Techmeme, where he tips stories every day—580 of those tips have appeared as headlines since the beginning of this year. You can read his last guest post here.

Like many out there, I have been, am and always will be a news addict. For many news junkies, it is the fleeting, current fix of information about a breaking topic that interests them, only to be replaced by the next headline. They jump from headline to headline, forgetting the one they just read as they move on to the next one.

For me personally, news is not only timely information on the current state of affairs but also a way to take a deep dive, to connect analysis and information together and learn through application.  I am looking for insight.  It could be patterns, it could be knowledge about an industry or it could be an opportunity to become introspective and ask questions.

Keeping this in mind, here is a snapshot of my consumption and distribution of news both offline and online.  I’ll divide the way I screen the news by the screens on which it comes to me.

No Screen:

• I don’t start a day without reading The Wall Street Journal in print
• Currently, I get 4 magazines and I go through them on the weekend: The Economist, The Atlantic, Wired and Fortune. Before they stopped, I used to also get Business 2.0 and MIT’s Technology Review.

Screen 1 – MacBook Pro:

Apps: Twitter, Google Reader, Techmeme and a little bit of Facebook

Twitter: I’ve been a user since January 2007.  Its always on for me. I invest a significant amount of time in figuring out who/what to follow based on my interests.  Today this ‘list’ stands at 489. Building this list is a continuous process and it typically consists of people who can teach or inform me of something, news sources and people I respect and with whom I want to build a long term relationship with independent of business. Of this, I have a column/list/group called “Pigeons” (birdie, early days of communication—you get it, right?).  I read each and every tweet of this group. I have about 75 in this group. 15 of my personal favorites, apart from @techcrunch and all those who write for it @techcrunch/team, are:

@bxchen – Technology Reporter, Wired
@148apps – iPhone App Reviews
@msuster – General Partner, GRP Partners
@jennydeluxe – Technology Reporter, The New York Times
@scobleizer – everything social media
@Learmonth – Reporter at Adage
@jasonhiner – Executive Editor at TechRepublic (CBS Interactive)
@leplaporte – Technology Journalist and Broadcaster
@appadvice – Editor, Webware (CBS Interactive)
@taylorbuley – Technology Reporter, Forbes
@sarahintampa – Writer, ReadWriteWeb
@reckless – Nilay Patel, Engadget
@gizmodo – Everything gadgets blog
@dmac1 – Technology reporter, Business Week
@joshk – General Partner, First Round Capital

You can follow them all in one click on the Twitter List I created called “Fifteen”

Screen 2 – iPhone: I have played with a few iPhone news apps, both paid and free.  These include the mobile apps from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times , Byline, Fluent News, News Fuse, BBCReader, NPR News, ReadItLater, ZenNews, and News Pro. I also visit mobile news sites. Being a little glued to Techmeme, I was very excited to see its new mobile version for smartphones—the icon took a spot right away on my home screen:

After experimenting and trying them all out, though, my current favorite native iPhone app is Newsstand (iTunes Link) which stays on my dock. Its a $4.99 app but it does the following extremely well for me:

1. Synchs beautifully with Google Reader and is fast.  It allows me to organize my folders, move them up and down and importantly very easily “Mark all as Read”

Below is a snapshot of my Feeds and a folder creatively named ‘Top News” that I keep a close watch on every day.

2) Newsstand has a lot of social goodness to share through Twitter, Delicious, ReadItLater and Instapaper

What’s Missing:
—bit.ly so that I can track data on the links I share as I do on Tweetie 2 with my API key.
—Sharing on Facebook
—Ability to RT or @respond to my twitter stream that I subscribe to as an RSS feed from within Google Reader.

Before social media, I always shared news via email to specific people. Now I have replaced email with these easy tools:
—Twitthat bookmarklet. One click.
—Twitterbar a Firefox Add-on customized with a prefix. One click.

—Google Reader’s Share is connected to my Twitter account. One click.
—Facebook Share bookmarklet or if I want it all on one place, I recommend Shareaholic.

Screen 3 – TV. I do not get my news here since I watch very little TV.

Screen 4 – eReader
I have a Kindle that I use to read books and have not switched from print to this one yet for news. As you can imagine, I get enough news on my other screens all day and like some time away from it.

Below is a visual of how I personally share news and the tools I use. Everything goes through Twitterfeed as my central hub for news going in and out.  Note that lately I stand undecided between Seesmic and Tweetdeck. (Image courtesy: Zurb, click to enlarge).

I spend a significant amount of money on news—4 print magazines, 2 newspapers with one online and iPhone apps.

The only screen I care about:

• well written analysis
• Unique and timely content/information
• Thought provoking story telling
• “Connection” with the writer—literally or figuratively from a style perspective
• Delivery channel. Find me—the “paperboy route” has changed

How do you screen the news?

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If you visit the regular Techmeme site now on devices like an iPhone, a Palm Pre, or the new Verizon Droid, you’ll see a site optimized for touchscreen phones. The site include three main tabs, “Top, ” More,” and “New.” These represent the three key areas of Techmeme’s main site. This tabbed navigation allows you to easily jump through the sections. Each section contains the main headlines and a right pointing arrow which you click on to see the discussion items.

As you’d expect, clicking on any headline opens that story (in a new browser window). Thumbnail pictures are also pulled in for main headlines. And there’s a ‘back’ button to make navigation easy.

Even if you don’t have an officially supported device, anyone can access the new site by visiting techmeme.com/m/. But why not do a native application, such as an iPhone app? “We might make a native app in the future, but with Android phones multiplying and capable browsers appearing on so many devices, it just made sense to start with something with broader support,” founder Gabe Rivera tells us.

Just yesterday, Techmeme announced that it had doubled it staff to 6 people.

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This message currently graces every page on Engadget. We’re not sure what they’re up to [Update: Yes we are.], but it’s promised to be “awesome awesome stuff,” editor-in-chief Joshua Topolsky tweets.

In fact, beyond the in your face teaser promising that, “What’s next is coming now. Stay close.”, Topolsky has been tweeting teasers all night. So Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera decided to respond (below):

Not ones to be left out of a super awesome please-refresh-our-page-every-5-seconds-party, we have a page of our own now (below):

(And before we start an Internet flame war, we’re just having some good clean fun with our friends at Engadget. We too are interested to see what their surprise is.)

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Rich DeMuro (formerly of CNET), Lidija Davis (formerly of ReadWriteWeb) and Mahendra Palsule (a former IT project manager) all join McCarthy to make up the editorial staff for Techmeme. Rivera notes that this team means they basically have human eyes watching for the best tech news 24 hours a day now. This allows Rivera and his fellow programmer, Omer Horvitz to keep the backend and the algorithm rolling.

When Rivera announced the addition of a human editor last year, it caused some controversy. Many people believed that only using a set of algorithms for surfacing news was better because it would take out much of the bias that a human might introduce to the system. But Rivera believes this curation is an integral part of the process to help with fast breaking news and to better filter out spam and old news being re-reported.

The result is a site that seems to be head and shoulders above other tech new aggregators, including Google News, which is quite bad. Maybe we’re a bit biased, since we sit atop Techmeme’s Leaderboard, but the other praise Techmeme has gotten throughout the years doesn’t lie (see the BlurbLog on the side of Rivera’s blog post).

Techmeme is also clearly Twitter-crazy now. Several months ago they added a way to tip stories to the site using the “tip @techmeme” syntax in tweets. That continues to be a valuable part of the site. Today, Rivera is highlight a Techmeme Twitter team list as well.

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Here we go again. The newspaper industry is blaming online news aggregators for its dwindling profits and inability to adapt to a world of links and truly-free flowing information. (They like it when information flows freely into their pages, but not so much when it flows out).

On Thursday, paidContent ran an essay by media consultant Arnon Mishkin called “The Fallacy Of The Link Economy” which was misguided on so many levels. Mishkin’s main argument is that:

The vast majority of the value gets captured by aggregators linking and scraping rather than by the news organizations that get linked and scraped.

It is not really clear whom he is calling an aggregator—actual news aggregators like Yahoo News, Google News, Digg, Techmeme and the Huffington Post, or anyone who links to a news story. After all, he equates the entire web to the blogosphere, which says more about his parochial industry view than about the web. In his mind, the web is the enemy and links are bad.

What really seems to concern him, however, are news aggregation sites. They threaten newspapers because they are emerging as the new front page which people skim every morning for headlines instead of going to any single newspaper site. Mishkin argues:

Historically, the value of those casual browsers was captured by the newspaper because the readers would have to buy a copy. Now all the value gets captured by the aggregator that scrapes the copy and creates a front page that a set of readers choose to scan.

Set aside for a second that ads on news aggregation sites are usually worth a lot less than ads on original content sites and thus they are not capturing the same value. More to the point, when I first read this my immediate response was that the value of news sites does not come from getting people to skim headlines, but to actually click through and read the actual stories. The newspaper industry wants to go back to the world before the Web, when each newspaper was a small media bundle packed with stories, 80 percent of which sucked. But it didn’t matter because you’d gladly pay a dollar to read the one or two stories that caught your eye on the front page, hoping there would be more inside.

Well, guess what? The media bundle is dead. News sites can no longer capture reader’s attention with 20 percent news, and 80 percent suck. Each story stands on its own in a world of atomized content where readers can come from anywhere on the Web, not just the front page. Now in addition to the front page, there are a million side doors. Reader lock-in is gone. The sooner newspapers get used to that concept, the sooner they can start to adapt and survive.

Which brings us back to the value of news aggregators. The newspaper industry is looking for someone to blame. Usually, it’s Google, but really anyone on the Web will do. Rather than blame the aggregators, news site should take advantage of them. On the Web, every side door can be a front page, whether it is Google News or search or Digg or Twitter or a feed reader or My Yahoo. I’ve said this before about Google, but it applies to any site that links to the news:

Google does not control the news, it exposes it. . . . It is incumbent upon each of us to attract an audience by having something original or interesting to say.

And if a news site or a blog can say enough interesting things enough times that news aggregators (or other sites) keep linking to them, then they can build up their brand and reader loyalty. Maybe readers will click on those links if they see it is coming from a trusted source, and then maybe some of those will start coming to the news site itself on a regular basis. But that loyalty must be earned every day, story by story, post by post. The more front pages (or side pages) which point to a news site’s stories, the more chances it has to gain that loyalty.

But the days of the media bundle when readers got all of the day’s news from one site are long gone. So too are gone the cushy days when newspapers could count “casual browsers” as real readers and sell them to advertisers. Newspapers had better get used to a world where links exist and can whisk readers away as quickly as they bring them. Those who don’t will learn that trying to recreate the past is a sure a path to an early grave.

(Flickr Photo: John Vachon/Library of Congress)

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It hasn’t even been 24 hours since we wrote about the impending launch of TweetMeme competitor ReTweet, and already TweetMeme founder Nick Halstead is threatening ReTweet with a lawsuit. He takes being king of retweets very seriously.

It is not so much the apparent flat-out copying of TweetMeme’s Website design (ReTweet has not even launched in private beta yet), that bothers him. After all, TweetMeme itself was highly “inspired” by another news aggregator, Techmeme. What bugs him is what he claims to be almost exact copying of code. Halstead writes on the TweetMeme blog:

What caught my attention was that some industrious individual (@travisketchum) had left a comment on the TechCrunch article that he had been doing some digging around on the website and had found a link to their development environment. What we found ourselves was that our retweet button Javascript and the Wordpress plugin code seemed to have been directly copied from ours.

Update: ReTweet (or at least its holding company Mesiab Labs) responds.

He had to look no further than the code for the retweet button itself. The code below is what he found, which he says is “an exact copy of our own retweet button code with the word ‘tweetmeme’ replaced with ‘retweet’”.

(function()
{
var _url=window.location.href;
var _url=_url.replace(/((?:?|&)?fbc_receiver=.+)?(?:#.*)?$/,”");
var url=((typeof retweet_url==”string”)?retweet_url:((typeof retweet_URL==”string”)?retweet_URL:_url)).replace(/+/g,”%2b”);
var source=(typeof retweet_source==”string”)?escape(retweet_source):((typeof retweet_SOURCE==”string”)?escape(retweet_SOURCE):false);
var style=(typeof retweet_style==”string”)?escape(retweet_style):((typeof retweet_STYLE==”string”)?escape(retweet_STYLE):”normal”);
var src=”http://174.129.199.128/meme/widget/tweets/”;
switch(style){
case”compact”:
var h=20;var w=90;break;
case”rednose”:var h=71;var w=60;break;default:var h=71;var w=60;break
}
src+=url;
if(source!=false)
{
src+=”&source=”+source
}
document.write(”);
retweet_url=null;
retweet_URL=null;
retweet_source=null;
retweet_SOURCE=null;
retweet_style=null;
retweet_STYLE=null})();

I just hope all of these startups realize that Twitter could just end up trademarking the term just like they did with Tweet.

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Retweet.com currently only has a a landing page saying that it’s “coming soon,” so it’s hard to know exactly what it is from that. But there are plenty of clues around the web pointing to it being a TweetMeme competitor. The main hint comes from a design contest taking place at 99designs. The prize is over $1,000 to design the site, and all of the mockups look very similar to TweetMeme (which, to be fair, takes a lot of its look from sites like Digg).

And there’s more. The group behind Retweet.com, Mesiab Labs (which seems to have a poor reputation among the Twitter community for products like Hummingbird, that some have accussed of spamming others), has a few sites related to Retweet.com that are already live. One is the URL shortener RT.nu, which will clearly be used to send out the retweets from Retweet.com. Another site, Checkretweet, scours Twitter for retweets for any user. Each of these play into the bigger strategy of the site, according to this blog post. And here’s the key nugget from that post, “Together, these systems allow us to detect and deliver breaking news faster than any other media outlet at present.”

So it looks like they’re setting up Retweet to take on not only TweetMeme, but also Digg, Google News, Techmeme and the new service that Bit.ly is working on. They key to all of this is obviously the links that are getting tweeted out and then retweeted. And because the latter word is entering the lexicon of the web, Retweet.com has a pretty awesome domain for trying to come along with a new service in this field.

That little trademark sign in the upper right hand corner of the logo is also interesting. It may just be for the logo, because it seems like they might have a hard time trademarking the word “retweet.” Though, that would be a potentially very scary situation for TweetMeme and all those little green buttons.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves though, Retweet.com still has to execute — and launch. But this is probably something to watch.

[thanks Orli]

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Apart from those, I consider an RSS reader to be such a vital tool for me as well, both on a private as a professional level. As I wrote before, I quickly fell in love with Streamy for that particular aspect of sifting through mountains of information on a daily basis, partly because it allows me to both track blogs and news sites I subscribe to and keep track of what Twitter and the people I follow on there as well as on Facebook and FriendFeed are buzzing about.

Add to that Techmeme, which has an algorithm in place designed to weed out the best and/or most talked about news stories related to the tech industry out there, and you can tell I have a pretty solid set of tools readily available that enable me to keep tabs on what I want and need to be tracking closely. Techfuga was another one, but it recently ground to a halt.

New to the arsenal of tools at my disposal free of charge is Tech Investor News, which despite its not-so-sexy name is exactly what it sounds like: a news site that investors in tech companies – plus industry pundits and reporters – should be made aware of. Glad to be of service.

TIN complements the websites and services described above perfectly, and competes with neither one of them. If anything, it saves me a lot of time and rids me of the pain of going to Google News / Blogsearch all the time to learn what the most recent stories in tech or centered around a company in particular are.

What I like about it? The big fat stock quote in the upper corner, the fact that you can filter down to 20 of the most discussed tech companies (note the Google Investor News screenshot below), the decent search function and the speed with which it updates news feeds (every 5 minutes or so, with some human editing involved). But what I also like is the fact that you can narrow your news consumption down to a specific set of categories which makes it very easy to find specific information (for instance, you can opt to display only stories about ‘Steve Jobs’ or ‘Rumors’ when browsing for news on Apple).

TIN is a project bootstrapped by a self-described ‘media nut’ / investor called Frank Cioffi, who spent decades working in such media as radio and television and turned to the internet after many years of consulting and trading stocks. Cioffi got the idea for Tech Investor News to scratch his own itch, and that’s always a good way to start something that other people – like me – could also find interesting.

Bookmarked!

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Techmeme is undeniably the leader of the pack; it has solid algorithms and ranking systems in place that can quickly detect breaking news and gives you a clean overview of which other technology news sites and blogs are discussing it practically with minimal lag. It has its flaws, sure, but I dare you to show me a service that does what Techmeme is supposed to do better than they are.

The only web service that I’ve ever seen pop up of which I thought it could potentially become a real Techmeme competitor was Techfuga, a site that mimicked Techmeme in many ways but added some extra bells and whistles (like Twitter search, for example). At launch, the site garnered quite a bit of positive commentary. Louis Gray said Techfuga was the result of mating between Techmeme and Alltop, and Robert Scoble said the site was showing Techmeme how to innovate. But don’t bother going to the site right now to check if they were right. It’s been down for a few days and you won’t see it come back up again for a couple of months.

While we’re still awaiting a formal response from Techfuga founder Joao Azevedo, we gather from his latest tweets and FriendFeed chatter that he plans to rebuild the entire platform and come back with a completely overhauled Techfuga in a couple of months. It’s beyond me why the startup doesn’t just keep this version live and switch to the new one whenever it’s ready for prime time, but Joao says on FriendFeed that this is because of “set up and costs management during this development time”. Judging from its traffic estimates, I doubt a lot of people are actually going to miss it.

That said, I do hope they come back with something awesome, because I happen to think we need more competition in this space.

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SkyGrid, the nifty, free financial news aggregator, is now publishing a stream of news on Twitter, letting users follow breaking business news headlines via the microblogging network.

The news aggregator, which only features stories about publicly traded companies, not only has an comprehensive Twitter feed for news stories, but the site also has Twitter feeds that are broken down by sector. So users can follow SkyGridHealth or SkyGridEnergy for sector-related news. SkyGrid currently has separate Twitter feeds for 8 different industries. SkyGrid says that the Twitter feed may be especially useful to users who want to access SkyGrid on their mobile devices.

Similar to TechMeme and Google News, SkyGrid clusters related news stories based on keyword analysis, what they’re linking to, etc. SkyGrid also tries to determine the sentiment of each article – red for negative, green for positive.

As we wrote in our earlier review of the services, SkyGrid is an incredibly useful tool, especially now that it is free. But the one element that is missing from SkyGrid is coverage of larger private companies, like Facebook. In order to become a serious competitor to popular aggregators like Techmeme (which also has a Twitter firehose), the site will need to expand its range of coverage. But especially for people in the financial services industries who use Twitter as a news source, SkyGrid is on the right track to providing users with real-time valuable financial news.

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Fever is a hot new RSS reader that aims to cure “second inbox syndrome, unread item guilt, and unbold elbow.” In other words, the common plights of the modern RSS power user.

Besides offering a full-featured feed reader, the application attempts to create a personalized Techmeme by scanning a user’s feed list for popular (or hot) links. Fever then groups these links into stories and assigns each a “temperature.” This allows a user to quickly keep a pulse on what’s going on in his or her “slice of the web.”

The other refreshing feature of the app is its move away from email inbox-style unread counts. As a long-time Google Reader user, I always dreaded the experience of returning from an offline vacation only to find several thousand unread items in my reader. With Fever, the emphasis is on dividing subscriptions into two camps: must-reads (called Kindling) and everything else (Sparks). By moving the “hit-or-miss” feeds into the Sparks bin, Fever ensures that a user gets only the most relevant content.

I’ve been using the product for a little less than a week and it has yet to disappoint. I now feel like I’m always aware of the trending stories in my area of Internet interest. Furthermore, I’ve been able to subscribe to a number of high-volume feeds that I would have never added to my Google Reader. And since I added them as Sparks, they now help Fever’s algorithm better find the most interesting stories from my Kindling.

Fever is the newest product from designer/developer Shaun Inman: He is also the creator of Mint, a web site analytics suite (not to be confused with Mint, the financial site); Shortwave, a command line bookmarklet; and Horror Vacui, an 8-bit iPhone game.

Although Fever has fully replaced Google Reader as my everyday feed reader, there are two drawbacks to the app: its cost and its requirements. Fever costs $30 (there is no demo or trial available). It also requires self-hosting and self-installation. Ultimately, this will prevent widespread adoption.

A possible solution to increase mass appeal would be if a hosting company, e.g. Media Temple or Rackspace, were to offer a hosted version of Fever for a few dollars a month. Even better would be an ad-supported free version.

But in the end, Inman seems to be fine with a more targeted market:

The price for feed readers has bottomed out at free so anything more than that is going to turn certain people off. And I don’t mind the deterrent. Most products price to be inclusive, to make the most money possible. I designed Fever (like Mint) first and foremost for myself. Any money I make on top of the personal utility I get out of it is just icing on the cake.

I also support my customers personally. Anything I can do to keep that level of support manageable helps — especially with two commercial products.

Check out the demo video here.

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Tweetmeme is on a tear. According to Compete, the Twitter-centric link tracker went from nowhere in February, 2009 (with 26,000 unique visitors) to more than tenfold increase in March (to 385,000 uniques). Nick Halstead, The CEO of UK-based Fav.or.it, the company behind Tweetmeme, tells me he is tracking closer to 200,000 uniques a month based on yesterday’s visitors, but that he is adding 50 percent a week. Tweetmeme seems to be pulling way ahead of the other Twitter link sites such as Twitturly or Twit Links. Any way you slice it, Tweetmeme is doing something right.

The site shows the most popular links on Twitter ranked by a combination of the number times the link has been Tweeted (shown as a big number beside each headline), recentness, and momentum of Tweets. It also categorizes different news stories based on the title of the post or article, the underlying domain, and hash tags within the Tweets. You can sort by Comedy, Entertainment, Gaming, Lifestyle, Science, Sports, Technology, or World & Business. You can also sort by news, Images, or videos. It pulls together 200,000 links, images, and videos every day now. And you can follow what is makes it on Tweetmeme’s homepage via Twitter itself by following the @Tweetmeme account or sub-accounts for each channel such as @tm-technology or @tm_comedy.

Today, it added OAuth, which lets you sign in with your Twitter account and retweet headlines without leaving the page. It also launched a toolbar, which will be controversial because it opens up the underlying link within a Tweetmeme URL and frame much like the Diggbar does. Instead of showing how many times the story has been Dugg, the frame shows a count of how many times the story has been Tweeted along with a “Shuffle” button (equivalent to the Diggbar’s “Random” button) that will take you to another highly Tweeted story.

I am not a big fan of the toolbar in principle, but I can see why Halstead added it. It keeps people on Tweetmeme and drives more activity. At least, it can be easily closed. But with every site adding its own frames these days, pretty soon there won’t be any room left for the actual destination site you are trying to look at.

What I am a big fan of, though, is that after a recent relaunch, it just keeps adding features. A few weeks ago it added a “live” tab which shows the most Tweeted links stream onto the page much like FriendFeed now handles your personal activity stream. Thankfully, you can set it to stream only stories that have been Tweeted at least 5, 10, or 20 times. Even setting it to 5 links is unreadable because the stream moves down too fast, but at 10 or 20 its becomes more manageable and addictive in that you can watch the most popular links in the Twittersphere stream by in real time.

This live stream of relevant headlines is much more immediate even than what you find on Techmeme, which can take hours to change meaningfully. With so many sites gunning for Techmeme’s crown as the ultimate arbiter of what news is being talked about the most on the Web (I wrote about one such attempt earlier today), the real threat is going to come from somebody like Tweetmeme, which plays to different strengths. The question is whether Twitter will be a better place to mine for buzz than blogs, news sites, or the rest of the Web.

Right now, I’d say the answer is no. Not because Tweetmeme doesn’t surface the most Tweeted stories, but because everyone on Twitter seems to be obsessed with linking to stories about Twitter! For instance, right now 6 of the top ten headlines on Tweetmeme are about Twitter acquisition rumors. To be fair, that was also the top story on Techmeme for most of the day. But at least Techmeme has moved on (to Kindle rumors!). Will the stories on Tweetmeme ever become more relevant and timely than on Techmeme? If I were Gabe Rivera, I’d start worrying now.

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The future of media is algorithmic aggregation, at least that is the approach Future US is taking. The U.S. subsidiary of Future PLC, and publisher of such niche magazines as Nintendo Power, Guitar World, and Maximum PC, is adopting a different approach online than simply putting its print articles on the Web. Instead, it has launched dozens of news aggregation and discovery sites called “Blips” that are a combination of Techmeme and Digg. The Blips collect topical stories from across the Web and present the headlines in discussion clusters like you’d see on Techmeme, but stories can also then be voted up the page like on Digg.

There are about 40 different Blips on various topics, including TechBlips, EarthBlips, and WrestlingBlips. All of them are accessible from Future’s online portal, DailyRadar (which also houses the magazine content under games, music, tech, entertainment, and sports tags). Future has been launching Blips quietly since last summer, and they now account for 9.3 million of DailyRadar’s 27 million monthly unique visitors (which is up from about 12 million uniques a year ago before the Blips sites were added). These are internal numbers. ComScore shows 11.4 million uniques worldwide in March, 2009 up from 6.4 million last September.

The Blip sites are based on Future’s $3 million acquisition of BallHype last year. Now Future is rolling out about half a dozen new Blips every month. The underlying technology evaluates 26,000 different news sources, blogs, video sites, and photo sites to create topical Blips. Once a source is white-listed by an editor or added by a reader, it then becomes part of the mix. Stories are clustered together, with the placement of headlines determined by a combination of links, votes, and age (newer stories rank higher).

I am not convinced the Blip strategy will make a meaningful difference for Future or offset the downward spiral in print advertising, but it is an interesting attempt at adaptation. TechBlip is not going to displace TechMeme any time soon, but most of the other Blips address under-served or highly-focused niches: AnimeBlips, CricketBlips, CraftBlips, GuitarWorldBlips, MommyBlips, etc. Niche news aggregation is one thing, but then aggregating the aggregators gives Future the scale to sell ads across all of the Blips. On the other hand, the Blips are so targeted running ads across the network might not always make sense. If you are targetting mommies, you are probably not interested in reaching anime aficionados.

To show off the technology, DailyRadar has an interactive Trendmap showing which tags and keywords are peaking on the site. You can create Trendmaps for different broad categories and grab it as a widget, which I’ve done below:

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All you need to do is send a message on the micro-sharing service that begins with “Tip @Techmeme” or “Tip @TechmemeFH”. The website, which aggregates news stories from across the web and determines which ones are worth featuring on the site and also detects links and relations between stories, will consider the article to be posted for many tech fanatics and professionals news reporters to see. And you’ll get credit with your Twitter id too!

This, of course, is a direct result of the recent hire of a human editor at Techmeme, which essentially came down to the popular website giving up on fully automated news.

According to the blog post announcing the new feature, tips will be processed through a combination of automated and manual means, although we’re not really sure what that’s supposed to mean, exactly. The Q&A part of the post only mentions that tips will be “promptly found” thanks to the Twitter Search API.

Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera added that they’ll be able to grab the target URL for the most common URL shortening services, that they’ll be able to fight off spam, and that it’s generally not a very good idea to submit your own stories (except in undefined, rare cases).

The question is: why does Techmeme need this in the first place? It’s not like it’s a news website where content is actually published, and the algorithm that makes certain stories stick out automatically has proved its usefulness in the past, so why depend on user submissions for good stuff?

The service does drop the ball now and again, but crowdsourcing headline gathering is a peculiar move for a website that once prided itself on being entirely automated.

That said: hey Techmeme, here’s a tip for you.

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This is a list of the products I tend to use daily. Some are for work (Wordpress, Delicious, Zoho, etc.), some are for fun (MySpace Music, Hulu, etc), and some are useful for both (Digg, Skype, YouTube, etc.). But I use most of them every day, or nearly every day, and I would not be as productive or happy without all of them.

The list changes a bit from year to year, and is also getting longer (see chart). Just three products have been favorites all four years: TechMeme, Skype, Wordpress. TechMeme continues to be the news aggregator I check multiple times per day to keep up on tech news. Skype is the instant messaging and VoIP platform that I use most often, and Wordpress software powers all of our blogs.

I’ve added nine new products, including one gadget (which I’ve left off in the past): Animoto, Friendfeed, Hulu, iPhone 3G, MySpace Music, Pandora (which was on in previous years) Docstoc/Scribd and Yammer.

I’ve removed six products from last year’s list: Amazon Music, Amie Street, Firefox, Flickr, Netvibes, Technorati.

I still use the products I’ve removed, just not as much as in previous years. I find I’m just using Netvibes and Technorati less this year (Netvibes because Google Reader is so excellent, Technorati has fallen in favor of Google Blog Search mostly because it’s too slow and has too many internal links). I tend to upload photos to Facebook now because of the people tagging feature and since it flows well with the rest of my news feed (I use Posterous for mobile uploads); Flickr is becoming less important for me. I have moved most of my music consumption to MySpace Music, and download DRM-free MP3s from iTunes when I want to buy. Amie Street is still a great place to discover new music though, and I think their business model, which is variable pricing for music based on its popularity, is sound. Firefox is off the list as I experiment with Chrome, but I haven’t made a decision one way or the other. When Chrome launches for the Mac, I’m likely to switch.

As in past years, there are a gaggle of other great products that I use regularly but didn’t add to the list in order to keep it manageable. I also haven’t added individual iPhone apps that I use daily, even though they are nearly as important to productivity and fun as the products that did make the list. Next year I expect more than a few will be added.

Here’s the current list, in alphabetical order, of products I use every day and couldn’t live without:

800-Free-411

800-Free-411 first made the list in 2007 and it isn’t leaving any time soon. Use it to make free directory assistance calls and avoid per call charges of up to $3.50 that cell phone carriers charge. The company has taken more than 6% of the market for directory service calls in the U.S. Google, Microsoft, AT&T and others have entered the market, but Jingle Networks, the company offering the product, has a patent on the idea of pairing advertising with free directory service. Here’s a tip: add “FREE411USA” as a Skype contact and do lookups that way, too.

Animoto

Animoto, which joins the list for the first time this year, does one thing, and well: it creates slide shows from photos. Unlike all the other services on the list, I don’t use it daily. But their new iPhone application put it over the edge this year. I really like this service.

Delicious

Social bookmarking site Delicious has been on the list for three of the four years (I took a brief detour in 2007 to a competing service called Blue Dot, then switched back). Delicious 2.0 is finally stable and the Firefox add-on is the reason I keep using it. Also, they long ago switched away from the annoying del.icio.us domain name, so I don’t have to look up where the dots go every time I visit the site.

Digg

Digg has been on the list the last three years. The site remains a fun place to hang out when I have some spare time to review the news, and Digg is one of our top ten sources of traffic. Hacker News is another Digg-like news site that focuses on tech that I visit daily as well.

Facebook

I visit Facebook daily to keep up with what my 5,000 closest friends are up to. I’m not a big fan of most of the applications that have launched on Facebook, but I do use it for photos and events. Unlike last year, though, I also now use MySpace as well regularly to reach people. These are the two social networks you have to be on to keep in touch with everyone.

Friendfeed

Friendfeed, a microblogging and activity aggregating service, only officially launched in February 2008. I use the service daily, although I’m not nearly as addicted as some bloggers are to the service. But like Twitter, Friendfeed is a good place to find breaking news on a variety of topics, and it’s become a must have service.

Gmail

I’ve never been a fan of the way Gmail groups message threads, and things like tagging of messages could be improved, but the service is far and away superior to any other web mail service in terms of features (Yahoo Mail has the best user interface in my opinion). I continue to rely on Gmail as my main personal email provider. Once Gears is integrated for offline use, I may stop accessing it via IMAP.

Google Reader

Three years ago I was using Bloglines to read feeds. Then I tried NetNewsWire for a while. But Google Reader, which first launched in October 2005 as a seriously flawed product, continues to evolve and is by far the best feed reader on the market today.

Hulu

Hulu isn’t about work, it’s about watching TV and films after the work is done. I openly mocked the service for nearly a year as they fumbled around, but now here it is, on a list of sites I visit constantly. I spend more time watching Hulu than I do normal cable television.

iPhone 3G

The first gadget I’ve included over the years – the iPhone 3G, which was announced on June 9, 2008, is simply the best device I’ve ever used. Sure, it doesn’t have a physical keyboard. But I can actually browse the web with this thing, and that more than makes up for a slower typing speed. This is a beautiful thing.

MySpace Music

MySpace Music is just a couple of months old and is still very buggy, but it changed the way users think about music on a big scale. MySpace combined its millions of band/artist pages with legal and free streaming music from the labels and creating a very compelling music product. Services like LaLa have a better user experience, but they still charge for streaming. Free is the future of music.

Pandora

Pandora, an Internet radio service that creates stations based on music you like, was on the list the first two years. I still listen to it all the time, and their new iPhone application put it over the top again to get on this year’s list. Pandora was one of the first startups we covered on TechCrunch, and they recently passed 20 million registered users.

Scribd & Docstoc

We use both Docstoc and Scribd here at TechCrunch regularly. Both services let you upload office type documents (PDFs, Word docs, Powerpoint presentations, etc.) and then embed them on other sites. When there’s a lawsuit complaint or interesting PDF, we add it to one of the services and embed it in our post.

Skype

Skype Skype has been on my list every year and I expect it will stay there. It’s the most important productivity tool that I have – I’d give up email before I gave up Skype.

TechMeme

TechMeme is another four-year favorite. It is the blogosphere’s daily newspaper, and one of the sites we use most often in seeing how stories develop. I’m amazed that founder Gabe Rivera hasn’t accepted any of the many buyout offers I’ve heard he’s been floated. In December 2008 TechMeme gave up on fully automated news, which I believe changes the site for the worse.

TripIt

If you travel a lot, you are going to love TripIt, which returns to the list this year. It keeps you organized, it’s incredibly easy to use and it’s just a perfect, simple service. Read our post on TripIt to get an idea for how it works. You forward confirmation emails from flights, hotels, etc. to the service and it creates an itinerary automatically. You can then access it via a mobile device.

Twitter

Last year a lot of people still hadn’t heard about microblogging service Twitter. Now, Britney is on it and the company is turning down half-billion dollar buyout offers. I mostly access Twitter through a desktop client called Twhirl, and I check it multiple times per day.

Wordpress

We continue to use Wordpress open source software to power all of our blogs, and it has been on the list all four years. Their Akismet spam comment blocking service is a godsend – without it we would quite simply be overrun with spam. It catches 15,000 or more spam comments per day and auto-deletes them.

Yammer

Yammer, a spin off of a startup called Geni, is a newcomer this year. They launched at TechCrunch50 in the Fall and took the top prize. The service acts as a Twitter for businesses, letting employees send messages back and forth to subscribers. It’s way more effective than email at group communications, and we absolutely rely on it here at TechCrunch.

YouTube

YouTube has been on the list the last three years. I continue to burn time watching random videos on the site, and we use it to upload our own videos as well. Sure they sent us a Cease & Desist letter a while back, but I still love em.

Zoho

Zoho, as well as its competitor Google Docs, continues to replace Microsoft Office for most of my word processing and spreadsheet needs. The feature list is still light compared to the heavy, expensive Microsoft version, but its free and I can collaborate with others on documents. This is the future of office productivity.

Update: I’m seeing other bloggers put together their own lists. Let me know in the comments if you do one and I’ll link to it. Here’s one by Tony Bain. More: Guilmain, NewsCred, Honkin (Chinese blogger), Ghost Hack Beauty, Mario Bruggemann

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That isn’t working, says founder Gabe Rivera today in a blog post: “Only an algorithm would feature news about Anna Nicole Smith’s hospitalization after she’s already been declared dead, as our automated celeb news site WeSmirch did last year.”

He’s hired someone to start vetting stories that the algorithm says are headlines, to either push them up or get them off the site entirely.

I believe this is a slippery slope for TechMeme. Certainly a human editor can make the results better. But it also completely destroys the objective nature of TechMeme and turns it into something different. It’s now subjective, and in many ways just another news site.

Today the TechMeme Leaderboard (and we track individual authors on CrunchBase) is an objective list of what sites are breaking the most news and getting other trusted news sources (”trusted” being defined by TechMeme) to link to them. With these changes it isn’t clear what authority that Leaderboard commands.

Overall I think we can expect better and faster news on TechMeme, which is an invaluable resource for journalists, bloggers and news junkies. But the fundamental nature of it has changed.

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As a concept, Veritocracy is actually quite simple.  At its heart, social news site pulls together some of the better qualities of Techmeme — targeted stories and related posts to an original story — and Digg. Once you get to the front page, you’re immediately presented with a nice layout of highly-targeted stories on topics ranging from politics and technology to business and entertainment.

The site collects what it deems to be the best perspectives on various subjects from around the Web, groups them together by topic, and lets its users decide which is best through the use of a voting system. As a user votes on different stories, Veritocracy becomes more personalized to that specific user’s tastes. And as long as that engine works well, Veritocracy claims publishers will be able to find the ideal target audience and readers will find stories that fit their interests.”The ultimate objective,” says CEO Lee Hoffman, “is to create a truly meritocratic content distribution system where each article a writer publishes finds its way to the individual readers that will actually want to see it.”

Before that can happen, Veritocracy has a long way to go. Right now, the site is in private beta and is slowly working its way towards a wider release later this year. If you want to check out Veritocracy for yourself, Veritocracy sent us 500 invites for TechCrunch readers. To redeem your invite, type “techcrunchlove” into the invite box, sign up, and start using it.

After trying it for a while, it quickly becomes apparent that if users find reasons to use this site and the company can deliver on its lofty promises, Veritocracy could become a destination for news junkies.

In each category, you’re presented with a story — “Palin takes the stage on night two at the convention” for example — that can be clicked on. Once you click that link, you’ll drill-down into perspectives on the Vice Presidential nominee’s speech last night at the Republican National Convention. Some say it was great, others are more suspect of its success. From there, you can click on the links to be brought to the respective article or you can vote them up or down based on your own opinion on the subject.

As votes start accumulating, Veritocracy promotes the better stories to the top. At the same time, each of your votes is recorded and remembered to help create a more enjoyable experience the next time you come back to the site. In other words, if you continually vote stories by conservative pundits down in the politics section and you tend to enjoy stories that are more “cranky” in the technology section, Veritocracy will tailor your experience based on those votes.

As CEO Hoffman points out, “Veritocracy isn’t a popularity contest, so voting up all of your friends’ content will only cause you to see more of their stuff, and the stuff they like.”

That in mind, the success of Veritocracy depends on the honesty of its users. The name “Veritocracy” is derived from the concept of meritocracy: those stories that deserve to be best will be. If users vote for those perspectives that deserve to be promoted, the site should run as designed: the best stories on each topic will rise to the top, and the greatest number of users will have a personalized experience.  How will Veritocracy fight people trying to game the rankings?  Hoffman explains:

We do this by learning how effective each user on the site is as an editor for you by comparing your vote histories. Unlike other personalization/recommendation systems (think Amazon, and Digg’s new recommendations) our system significantly ramps up the accuracy of these predictions by using a market based design layered over the standard personalization algorithms.

If you submit crap, miscategorize your articles, or even vote for other people’s crap, readers won’t be voting for the same things you are (and may even vote down things you vote up) and thus the the system will uncorrelate you from everyone (or won’t correlate you to them in the first place). This will make sure your content and votes have less chance of effecting what other users see in the future. Of course, a lot of the time “crap” and “quality” are entirely relative, and that’s where the system really shines because it learns to distinguish this for each user, based on the same design principal.

Veritocracy also lets the original authors of stories submit them on different topics. (Veriticracy funnels all stories into consistent topics instead of tags).  After a specific topic is identified, users can upload their own stories, which will then be placed as a perspective on the given topic. Once there, other users can vote it up or down based on its quality and relevance to the topic.

But because so much of Veritocracy’s success relies on its community, it’s tough to say how well it will perform—for now, few even have access to it. But the site has promise. It just needs more participation.

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The husband and wife behind BallHype and ShowHype, two Digg clones that focus on baseball and entertainment news, have earned a modest pay day: $3 million from media group Future US. That’s not bad given the two never raised institutional funding since launching the first site (BallHype) in April 2007.

Users of BallHype and ShowHype (which launched in October 2007) vote up their favorite stories, and these stories hit the homepage page as they would on Digg, Reddit, or Mixx. But because these sites must cater to their respective niches, users can also view news from narrow topics, such as particular sports teams and celebrities (for example, you can get the latest dish on Amy Winehouse here).

Frontpages for news on the web generally breaks down into two categories: those created algorithmically, and those created through crowd-sourcing. In the baseball sector, the crowd-sourcing approach appears to be winning – BallHype attracts multitudes more visitors than BallBug, a sister site to Techmeme that surfaces baseball news algorithmically.

The size of this transaction was not formally announced but was made known to us by a source familiar to the deal.

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Gabe Rivera finally added search to Techmeme last month. But already he is making it much better. Rivera just added a nice prospective search feature to the site.

Anytime you search Techmeme, you can subscribe to future search results for the same term through an RSS feed. Just click on the RSS icon in your browser after you do a search, and you will get a feed for stories that appear on Techmeme with that term. So you can keep track of breaking Techmeme news about that particular subject in your feed reader.

By default, the feed only includes stories with your search term in the headline or first few sentences, but you can opt for any mention of the term throughout the story as well. This is a good way to keep track of breaking news on companies or products. For instance, you could subscribe to a feed for the term “iPhone” or “Google” or “Twitter.” In fact, we already incorporate a Techmeme feed for this very purpose in our Crunchbase profiles. (The image above is the latest feed in the sidebar of Techmeme’s page).

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Who knew Duncan Riley was such a Greasemonkey? My former colleague just made FriendFeed a lot more useful for people on Firefox. Using Greasemonkey, an add-on to Firefox that lets developers customize Webpages through the browser, he created some scripts that add tabs to FriendFeed and that make it even more of a super start page than it already is.

He got the idea from this app called FriendFeed Tabs that lets you add Techmeme as a tab. When you click on the tab, news aggregator site Techmeme appears within FriendFeed.

Duncan went further and added scripts to add tabs that show Google Reader, Facebook, Twitter, Netvibes, Plurk, ReadBurner, and his own version of a Techmeme tab inside of FriendFeed. He also created scripts for TechCrunch and CrunchGear. (Thanks, Duncan!) You need to add Greasemonkey to Firefox before you can install any of these scripts. But once you do, and relaunch your browser, whenever you go to FriendFeed the tabs will appear and you can scroll through the sites at your leisure.

Some of these tabs are redundant with FriendFeed itself, which lets you bring in RSS feeds and your Twitter feed, for instance. But the tabs let you access these sites and services in a more traditional view, and you can always toggle back to the FriendFeed stream. And now, for people who check more than one of these sites on a daily basis, they can simply access them all from FriendFeed. (Note: these scripts are essentially a hack, and there may be some issues, which Duncan describes in this post).

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But right from the start people noted that TechMeme had no search feature. Founder Gabe Rivera answered at the time: Don’t hold your breath. For posterity’s sake, here’s our first post on TechMeme, then called Memeorandum.

Anyway, those days are over, starting today. TechMeme search launched moments ago at techmeme.com/search, making it easy to find archived stories. Results are returned only for items that have appeared as full headlines on Techmeme, in reverse chronological order. Headlines appearing only in “Discussion” are excluded. And basic search only returns results that appear in the title of the item or in the first couple of sentences.

There is also an advanced search feature, however, that allows for full text search of the underlying blog post or article. Users can also search just by date, author, source, etc.

For now, Rivera says, he’s only releasing search for TechMeme. Search for sister sites Memeorandum (political news), WeSmirch (celebrity gossib) and Ballbug (baseball news) will come “soon.”

TechMeme also isn’t just a one-person shop any more. Rivera hired his first employee, Omer Horvitz, who built the search feature, late last year.

See the BloggerBoard for details on the top tech blogs and bloggers based on TechMeme headline data.

Update: Well we had this exclusively for all of 10 minutes. TechMeme’s post on the new feature is here.

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As promised, the team (Mark McGranaghan and Henry Work) has put together much more detailed statistics on the blogs and bloggers that publish tech news headlines and has published it over at CrunchBase.

The top 100 blogs are listed here along with the top three authors by publication. The default view is “all time,” which is back to March 2006, but can be toggled to the last 90 days, last month, or last seven days. The image below shows the top ten publications by all time.

The data can also be viewed by author here with the same time toggles.

Blogs and authors can be clicked on to see links back to TechMeme for each of the headlines. Here’s Erick Schonfeld, for example.

This data goes back much further than the TechMeme Leaderboard, and it also calculates things differently. The leaderboard looks at the last 30 days and calculates top sites based on share of headline space, meaning how long a headline stays up affects rankings. Our calculations look only at the raw number of headlines, nothing more.

More data is coming soon. And check out StatBot, a new site that is also doing some great work slicing up data from TechMeme and other sites.

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While about a 30 percent of the headlines are hogged by the top ten sources on the Techmeme Leaderboard (see table at left), another full third come from blogs and sites that don’t even rank in the top 100. That means that if you have something interesting to say, it doesn’t matter who you are, other blogs will find you and link to you. Right now that would include the post on Statbot, which is written by a self described “17-year-old wannabe geek from India” named Yuvi. Welcome to the conversation, Yuvi. A sure-fire way to get on Techmeme is to . . . write about Techmeme. But there are plenty of other ways to get there as well.

Personally, I think the distribution shown in the graph is what makes Techmeme so compelling. It always includes a pretty steady list of trusted sources, but mixed in with those are plenty of wild cards who can, in turn, become dominant voices in their own right. That’s how I like my news: a third from relatively well-known sources, a third from sources that are a complete surprise, and the rest to be from somewhere in between.

See the top individual bloggers by the TechMeme Leaderboard as well.

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For now we thought we’d show a teaser – below are the top 100 tech bloggers/authors, based on the total number of headlines they have had on TechMeme from January 1, 2008 until today. The data isn’t 100% perfect as we’ve been grabbing it only once per hour, so a headline that was up for less than one hour may not be counted. But in terms of tracking the most popular bloggers, the data is meaningful. Since a lot of the top leaderboard blogs are multi-author, this helps to shake out who’s actually writing the popular stories.

Clarification: This list doesn’t take into consideration authors who write for multiple publications.

Full list is below:

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A Good FeedReader

Many consider that understanding and subscribing to feeds is a given, but the reality is that terms like RSS, Atom, and even Feeds are foreign to most people. The starting point is always a good feedreader. My personal choice is Google Reader, but I was a Bloglines fan for many years and they’ve been implementing a lot of extra features, so ultimately pick between the two. Once you’ve picked a FeedReader you should naturally subscribe to TechCrunch here. One source is never enough, so subscribe to ReadWriteWeb, GigaOm and VentureBeat as well.

A Start Page

After TechCrunch naturally, I start my mornings on TechMeme. Gabe Rivera’s site is a favorite and despite some criticism elsewhere continues to accurately track the big stories in the tech blogosphere, and that includes general tech away from the stuff we cover on TechCrunch.

Twitter

Twitter I’m told is still an acquired taste, but I’m finding more and more that I pick up breaking stories first on Twitter. Twitter is only as good as the network you link in to; so it can be a bit hard (or barren) at first. The key is to give it time, and add friends.

Overall

If you want a full picture of our industry and space there are existing tools that allow you to do it well, complete with interaction. There’s a lot of noise out there, at times too much noise, but the tools listed can help you keep on top of it.

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