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.

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Related Articles at Startup Meme:

The App Store has another addition to its collection: an app for Tech News. The app is powered by Techmeme, the tech news aggregator. Though it’s a convenient way to access the latest news from around the Web, on your iPhone, but there are a few glitches involved. For one, when the app takes the major headlines from Techmeme, there’s no way you would know which one is the latest story, and secondly the app doesn’t offer the sub-stories additional feature offered on the site. To read the full news you click the headline, and it takes you to a short clip of the story, if you’re just looking to have a go-through over it – otherwise you can click the ‘Read full article’ and get the rest of the details. The app costs $0.99. Gabe Rivera, Techmeme’s founder said:

“I’m pleased they equate ‘Tech News’ with Techmeme, and wish them luck in making a little money with it. But if they make a lot, perhaps I should consult my lawyer.”

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Related Articles at Startup Meme:

Gabe Rivera of TechMeme is looking to hire someone to tweak and twist the TechMeme algorithms during the course of each day in order to better suit the users (which ever way you want to  take it). From a posting on Craigslist, we know the following:

We’re not sure what to call this position. News Technician? News Analyst? Configuring Editor? The role involves interacting with an automated news-picking computer algorithm, configuring it and prodding it to ensure balanced and comprehensive coverage of important news topic areas. It’s the kind of job that possibly has never existed until 2008 but will become increasingly important in the years ahead. It’s partly technical work, but requires no prior software or engineering experience. Training will occur on the job.

Its amazing how many places bloggers scroll to find out news items like this.

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Related Articles at Startup Meme:

Unlike other start pages, PopUrls is not general-purpose like iGoogle or My Yahoo. It is an aggregation site for dweebs, with a focus, by default, on tech-friendly user aggregation sites Digg, Delicious, and Reddit. It does, to be fair, grab headlines from The New York Times and Google News, but also does so from Slashdot and Wired. A top content section aggregates the popularity of PopUrls items across sites, giving you a very good idea of what's popular across all the tech aggregation sites at any given moment.

Not necessarily the news, but what the nerds at the major sharing sites are interested in.

PopUrls does offer customization features and alternative views, if you do want to adjust it. I have not. And recently, PopUrls got a new sharing feature. If you create an account with the service, you can get your own page, which shares items you like with others. You also get a widget to embed on your site. And you can set the system to send your shared items out to feeds like Twitter.

Given its built-in functionality and focus on tech, I find PopUrls a useful counterpart to TechMeme, which is far more responsive to news items and which does a better job of grouping stories together (PopUrls doesn't group similar stories at all). PopUrls tends to point to more frivolous stories, but it does show you what's striking the fancy of the geek set over a somewhat longer period of time.

For the last couple of days we’ve been asking people: how do you cope with all the info that bombards you through your RSS feeds, Twitter and similar services? When you’re young and eager to soak in as much info as you can, you’re happy to be flooded with the stuff. But, it can’t go on forever. So, how do you make sense of it, and filter out the junk?

It’s not an easy task, I can tell you that. As a journalist, I’m basically forced to go through everything; but sometimes I wonder whether it’s smarter to accept some collateral damage and heavily filter everything that comes in, because the signal to noise ratio is awful, and it doesn’t show signs of getting better. Just like junk food, some of us keep eating against our better judgment; the junk in our RSS feeds and tweets requires its own slow feed movement. Let’s take a look at what can be done about this and how you guys and girls are coping with the flood.

1. Yahoo Pipes - if you’re crafty and willing to put some time into battling the surplus of information in your feeds, Yahoo Pipes is the tool for you. When you delve a bit deeper into Pipes, the whole thing might start looking like a quite complex logic game, but trust me, there’s little you can’t do with this tool. Filtering feeds for specific keywords, mashing up several feeds into one, extracting chunks of data from feeds and matching those against other feeds…the possibilities are endless.

2. TweetDeck - when we asked our Twitter friends what they use to make sense of Twitter’s relentless noise, they responded almost unanimously: TweetDeck. It’s an Adobe Air desktop application, currently in public beta, that lets you split your main Twitter feed into meaningful chunks of information. Essentially, it’s the group feature everyone has been requesting since the dawn of time. The word on the street is that it’s best used full screen on a separate monitor; does it mean I have to buy another monitor (I already have two and I totally lack screen real estate) and call it TweetMonitor? Yes, it does.

3. Best of FriendFeed - FriendFeed is the information junkie’s favorite tool, and this little option can be a really nice way to quickly glance at what’s really good on a given day. It’s almost hidden in the upper right corner, under the view option; choose “best of” and you’ll get the post most liked (bookmarked, commented on) by your friends in the period of a day, week or a month.

4. xFruits - if slicing and dicing your RSS feeds in every way imaginable is your goal, the most elegant way to do it is xFruits. Instead of offering one tool that does everything, they’ve created several simple tools that can aggregate feeds, turn RSS into PDF, turn e-mails to RSS and a lot more.

5. Postrank - previously called AideRSS, this is one of our favorites. The main premise behind it is audience engagement; the better engagement ranking something gets, the more important it is. Postrank lets you set up RSS feeds based on this and filter them into channels. The best way to understand how all this works is to check out the video tutorials which explain the four main ways of using Postrank.

6. Techmeme - although a purely algorithmic affair, in the sense that you can’t filter feeds yourself or choose what you get in any way, Techmeme works so well it’s probably the best way to completely replace all your tech-related RSS feeds if you’re so inclined. Quick and relevant, Techmeme somehow manages to find the best news out there, with the number of reactions from blogs focusing your attention on what’s really important.

If you’re into technology, Techmeme is definitely an indispensable tool that saves your time. It also has a gossip news counterpart called WeSmirch, political news is handled by memeorandum, and you can find the best of baseball news on BallBug.

7. ReadBurner - similar to Techmeme in appearance, this service gives more weight to news items which are shared more often on Google Reader. This works surprisingly well, and the front page almost always brings you a great selection of current and interesting news. Disclosure is in order, as this project is Mashable’s Chief Editor Adam Ostrow’s baby.

So, have we convinced you to join the Movement? If nothing else, try one of these tools for size and see how you like the world with less feeds and more relevance. Most importantly, don’t forget to list your favorite tools for slowing down feeds in the comments.

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Even though New Media barkers like myself have been predicting the downfall of Heritage Media for some time now, the news is no doubt going to be shocking to the public at large.  

Not long ago, back in July or so, Duncan Riley wrote over at the Inquisitr that of all the failing Heritage Media formats, he saw the TV format hitting the crapper first. He wrote with a number of compelling reasons that I didn’t necessarily see as invalid, but after considering all the various trends felt the conclusion was in slight need of adjustment:

For instance, newspaper decline is largely financial in nature.  Certainly, when you’re talking about business, that’s the most important factor to measure a media type’s life span. Is that what we’re really talking about here, though? The death of the media type or the changing of the guard in terms of the dominant companies behind them. In either event, newsprint and text delivery of news is increasingly being dominated by online blogs and news portals. Circulation may be technically up, but revenues for the companies that resist the transition to online delivery are most decidedly down.

Wise newspaper publications are managing some sort of a transition to an online revenue, but most companies that have their base in serialized news in the printed form still have problems adjusting to the new formats that we in the blogging business take for granted.

Duncan is very positive that newspapers will always go the distance because of the need for quality journalism.  Unfortunately (at least for the newspaper industry) I don’t see this as a particularly convincing argument.  Quality journalism can and does take place outside of newsprint, and for a much greater profit. Some traditional text journalism outfits may realize this and make the transition.  Most won’t.

I hafta say, when I was making the prognostication, I wasn’t thinking specifically of the New York Times. After all, they’ve made significant investments into technology, have recently made themselves a real presence and participant in the blogosphere.

The problem remains, though, that they have a very top-heavy editorial structure, and need to make strategic cutbacks that will allow them to maintain the same editorial output without so much overhead. We talked about this on one of the last Mashable Conversations episodes that Sean and I put out.

As we said in that episode: 

This is a year in which newsprint looks far more likely to collapse than we’ve ever seen before. Meanwhile, top-tier blogs continue to prosper and find their niche as virtual magazines. Traditional media magazines seem to see the writing on the wall and are looking to meet New Media halfway. 

I don’t think that the New York Times is un-savable, but I think that the print edition and the print-based business model is dead. If you need proof that a transition can be made, simply look to the tons of online-only publications that well into the black. 

Clearly, the New York Times isn’t hurting for online traffic, and they’re a very monetizable brand. Very simply, they’re going to need to look at ways of producing the same type of content for less money. This likely means some segregation of the publication from it’s very top heavy corporate structure and a lot of their extraneous business units (like the Boston Red Sox) from the actual publication.

Once they’re able to re-focus on what they think their core business is (being the world’s publication of record), and doing it on time and under budget.

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Adsense revenue for Q3 was $1.45 billion. From this amount, Google paid to AdSense partners $1.33Billion. Thus their (average) margin for AdSense is 20.83%, which is slightly higher than the Q2 margin 20.48%.

The increase in the margin comes from either: 1) they charge more from advertisers or 2) pay less to the AdSense partners. Which is it? As my Adsense revenue is marginal, I cannot tell fro myself. Do you have any further information on this? Please comment below.

Company Name

Trendrr

20-Word Description

Trendrr tracks consumption trends across leading social media and e-commerce sites. Users can track, compare and share graphs easily for free.

CEO’s Pitch

Trendrr is a service that tracks and graphs consumption trends and activity across the digital spectrum, including social networks, blogs, torrents, Amazon, Craigslist, Twitter, Google, MySpace and leading video sites. The platform allows users to track dynamic data trends over time; compare and mash up data using a virtual scratch pad, and share findings via embed codes, links and easy data exporting.

Designed as a dynamic service for individuals who want to track trends for free with an enterprise level solution for businesses, Trendrr captures and illustrates accurate, real-time market intelligence in an easy to use, digestible format.

Mashable’s Take

If you want to track trends on the Web, you might watch some of the meme watchers. Techmeme, for instance. Or you might venture over to Technorati to see what’s happening in the wide world of blogs. Perhaps Google Trends is your de facto keyword catcher. Well, if you’re searching for something a bit more analytical and multi-faceted in looking at the whos, whats, wheres and whens of online movements past and present, Trendrr is something that you might well find useful.

There isn’t immense depth to what Trendrr can provide its users. This isn’t a news reading engine molded through graphical flow charts. It’s more a mix-and-mash utility, pulling information relevant to activity on social networks, blogs, torrent traffic, Amazon, Craigslist, Twitter, Google, and numerous video sites, and displaying said data in a visual fashion.

Want to track sales of a certain music album? You can. Twitter users, headline-making politicians, and most anyone or anything else you might think of is also possible to put up on its own grid, to be parsed and prodded by anyone who happens to pay it attention. You can interact with Trendrr graphs whether you’ve assembled them yourself or are simply audience to another user’s work. Drag the graph into the TrendrrScratchpad to be compared with another, post comments, vote for items you like, and embed finished products on webpages or social bookmarking and social news sites like Delicious, Digg, and Reddit.

What is particularly appealing about Trendrr is that the relevance of data within a graph does not end with the publishing date. Data continues to arrive. For instance, a Trendrr graph created in late March 2008 with a focus on Google News stories having to do with the names “barack obama,” “john mccain,” and “hillary clinton,” has progressed into the present day. If you’re in search of a long-term, automated guide to specific subject matter, Trendrr just so happens to be a near ideal solution. Again, it’s not hard on specifics insofar as news stories are concerned. But for a good number of users it’ll do the job.

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Sponsored By: Sun Startup Essentials

When Tim Berners-Lee conceived the web, he dreamed of inter-connected documents, of surfing along from one person's page to the next, following a fluid path rich with information and discovery.

Instead what we we got is a big honkin' billboard, as commercial interests hijacked Tim's vision. Just look at any popular web site today and you'll find only two kinds of hyperlinks -- paid ones and self-referential ones (that keep traffic from leaving the domain). The only relevant links come from portals like Google that monetize search. So instead of deeply browsing the web, we search and click, search and click, search and click... So much for friction-free information and serendipitous discovery.

The web will remain captive to publishers until users exercise control over the hyperlinks that define the web's structure.

I disagree with the Google-canonization in there (aren't they based around commoditizing creative content to serve as fodder for Google's proprietary advertising network?), but do agree that many website publishers reacted to the actual structure and incentives of the web, rather than to the original "universal hyperlinked documents" vision behind HTML. Unfortunately, you have to install something to learn what the entrepreneur intends to do about it -- a blogpost that's pitch, without punchline. But I did like his article's setup, and the attention paid to the dynamic between publishers and consumers.

The HTML-based World Wide Web is merely one application of The Internet. It uses familiar network addresses, and layout suggestions are provided by HTML markup. Any user agent can do anything they want with those layout suggestions, and as those layout suggestions become more complex and difficult-to-implement (HTML5's gonna be a doozy), publishers should expect that their work will be repurposed in ways they did not expect. Where only the file formats are specified, and the runtimes and data policies are left to chance, the work you publish will always be editable and republishable by others.

Nothing wrong with that consumer-centric view of the publishing transaction. But it clearly doesn't satisfy all needs of all creators. Sometimes you want to assure the presentation, not merely suggest a presentation. Today's commercial web, in particular, won't like its adlinks stripped out. Video producers generally don't want to be locked into an atomistic file format... their production investment tends to requires a trusted presentation layer.

Internet-based communication shouldn't be "captive to publishers". It shouldn't be "captive to consumers" either. We need a diversity of publishing models, so people can reach their own agreements. A single model won't do it.

Specifying the runtime complements the greasemonkeyable web. We need a variety of tools to be able to express all communication needs. We need to resist the authoritarians who insist on only one "true" model.

Summary: Go, Greasemonkey! Go, Flash! Go, AIR! We need 'em all.

The rumor mill is heating up this weekend in advance of Tuesday's press event, and one left-field rumor is coming from a familiar, yet unlikely source: Weblogs Inc./Mahalo founder and TUAW godfather Jason Calacanis, who dropped a mild bombshell in an interview with a CNET.uk blogger on Friday (yo, JC, where's the love?): Apple is developing HDTVs that will support streamed content from iTunes, says Calacanis, integrating the Apple TV functionality along with the display and tuner.

I would file this one under "signs unclear, ask again later" -- while Apple clearly has both the display and playback engineering already done (Cleve @ 9to5Mac suggests that "[t]echnologically speaking, Apple could probably put together [this] product in a three day weekend") it's not clear that a single-box product is that much more compelling than an Apple TV with a cheap HDTV. Then again, the magic of Apple integration could make the whole a stronger sell than the sum of its parts.

Word from London, meanwhile, reported via Edible Apple: star rumormonger and Digg founder Kevin Rose announced his expectation that the next round of MacBook laptops will feature Blu-ray drives onboard. This one rates a "probable" and certainly would be a great value differentiator for the new machines.

Lastly, as the NVIDIA-related reports continue, AppleInsider and PC Perspective are stating with high confidence that the new MacBooks will be the first to move away from the Intel integrated graphics chipset and onto the Nvidia MCP79 'system on a chip' platform. Intel processors will still be at the core of the laptops, but the NVIDIA chip will handle graphics, memory access and more. Interestingly, one of the purported features of the NVIDIA hardware is full Blu-ray functionality... ties in nicely with the Rose rumor above. Call it "more than likely."

[via Techmeme]