Techmeme River of News is Like Digg Spy But With Credible Sources Only
Tailrank River and Megite News River now face some stiff competition from Techmeme, a hugely popular technology news aggregator.
Gabe Rivera, the one man army of Techmeme, just announced the launch of Techmeme News River that will showcase all the top stories that are currently on the Techmeme front page.
Unlike the original Techmeme.com page, this river page is free of blogs that are just linking to the main story. It's like a long list of headlines but you can also see stories from the previous days arranged in reverse chronological order like blogs.
Thanks Gabe. Techmeme is now even more useful with the latest feature - River of News Presentation. There are a few things that may further improve the the overall experience:
1. A short summary of the posts as we see inside Techmeme.com - This summary may be hidden by default and readers may expand/collapse depending on their personal preferences.
2. While the results are sorted by date based on the river news principle, how about a small indicator with each story that shows the importance or significance of the story - we can base the importance of a story on the number of blogs linking to that post or whether A-list and influential bloggers are citing the story.
3. An easy-to-remember permanent link for river news pages, one for each day. For instance, if someone likes to see the river newspage for Dec 10, 2006, he could just type techmeme.com/river/12-10-2006 or something on those lines.
For readers - what do you think of Techmeme, Tailrank and Megite - which site in your opinion has a better news river implementation ?
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Reader Comments:
I'd like to observe that none of these "credible" aggregators include news from specialist sites -- ironic, given that these sources are likely to be more accurate on topics of interest to them. Sure, I'm biased because I run two such sites (one for music tech, one for motion graphics tech), but I also notice virtually NONE of my favorite news sources is here.
Then again, that's really my whole problem with all of these sites, whether the sources are supposedly "credible" or driven by mass-readership. Bottom line? People should stick to their own custom RSS feed collections. You'll get profoundly better-targeted news, because you're the editor. And wasn't that originally the whole point of the Web?
Thanks Amit, and thanks for the tips. One problem though: everyone has a different suggestion, and in addition, my hunch is that after all the hubbub, only a very small percentage of users will use the rivers. If they prove more popular than this, I'll give a lot more thought to beefing up the features.
Peter: I agree, in fact. I think there's a place for both highly specialized, slightly specialized, and the generalist sites. Maybe consider Techmeme just another blog, but one that makes connections between posts and ideas in the larger tech news sphere.
BTW, Peter, nice blog. That stuff was actually going to be my hobby, until Techmeme consumed my life.
I wish you all good luck, and stay in competition.
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