9:27 pm - Wed, Dec 3, 2008

Thoughts on TechMeme’s Editorial Injection

I’ve had the pleasure of studying (ok, reverse engineering) most of the good automated news services and always enjoyed yours as it takes some smart shortcuts to implicitly measure popularity, similarity, freshness and reputation. The interesting thing to me is how long you held out against a curatorial/editorial layer, when literally every other automated/social aggregator has an editorial layer for their front page (even if they claim not to - they most certainly do, they can’t afford not to).

The only part I’m disappointed by is that you aren’t being nearly as creative about how to implement a behavioral overlay for the curatorial/editorial function. There are some ingenious ways to accomplish this out there already. Not to diminish the need for a true editor, and your choice is stellar - the buck must stop somewhere - but there are so many ways to combat algorithmic inertia and false positive outliers.