SOMEWHAT FRANK

Techmeme Opens Up The Firehose

Techmeme, the popular news aggregator, just released a new feature today which will allow anyone to keep up with the news as it flows into Techmeme called the Firehose. In the past Techmeme has only released feeds for items that were above the fold on the site (maybe 20 to 30 most popular items from a day). With firehose, Techmeme and all its vertical brands, WeSmirch for celebrity gossip, ballbug for baseball news and memeorandum for political news, will offer a constant stream of news from every headline and discussion link that ever appears on the site. As explained by Gabe Rivera on his blog:

"Any story attaining headline status on Techmeme (which exclude "Discussion" links) will appear in the feed within 5 minutes. This means well over 100 headlines per day for Techmeme Firehose, so casual news readers will want to use the Main feed (i.e. the previous, standard feed) instead."

Gabe has also put the firehose to Twitter so you can monitor the pulse of news on the go and as it comes in. This is great news for the tech, celebrity, baseball or politic news obsessed! TechCrunch also has more on the new Techmeme stream.

MacBook Air Unveiled, Yahoo Goes OpenID, Sun Buys MySQL, VC Funding At High, Facebook Plaxo Rumors & the 2007 Crunchies Awarded

Photo of the Week: Gabe Rivera of techmeme shows off his award for best bootstrapped startup at the 2007 Crunchies (more Crunchies coverage below). Photo taken by Zivity.

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 01.20.2008

Techmeme Leaderboard Ignites Conversation, Netvibes Expands Cobrands, Facebook Addiction, Web App 101 & Top Social Media Coverage

Photo of the Week: This is a photo of the sunset I was able to experience while on vacation this past week in Clearwater, Florida.

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 10.07.2007

TECH cocktail Takes On Washington

A few hours ago, TECH cocktail completed its first event in DC at the popular MCCXXIII bar (1223 Club DC, for the non Roman-numeral types).  The event was packed with hundreds of guests mingling as the place rocked to music, wine, product demos and mingling.  Over 225+ technology enthusiasts, VCs, bloggers and entrepreneurs came and celebrated the evening together. Wine Library TV, AOL, AN Hosting, BuzzXYZ, and Blue Sky Factory helped to sponsor the event - thank you all for your helping getting TECH cocktail going in DC.

It has been over a year since Eric Olson and I secured the TECH cocktail domain name and started firing up for these events. We were pleased to see such a great response in a new city as last night’s event was no different than the Chicago events that have become extremely big in the windy city.  Thank you to local blogger Nick O’Neill who helped plan the event - we couldn't have done it without you.

The event was well attended with a great mix of guests from a number of the local startups. It was great to see Gabe Rivera, techmeme creator, was in town from Silicon Valley and even dropped in. Demos were performed by the following companies:

BuzzXYZ powered by Blogdigger - helps track the buzz online
Clearspring - services for building, deploying and tracking widgets
Sportsvite - online community is bringing sports lovers together for on-the-field fun
PatentMonkey.com - fully search-able US patent text database
Wine Library TV - will be doing wine tasting and showcasing the wine video site

Though I am somewhat biased, TECH cocktail DC 1 went very well and was worth missing the finale of the Office to be there. I look forward to the next TECH Cocktail in DC and wherever else we choose to take it next.

Check out the photos tagged: techcocktaildc1. Special thank you to Raoul Pop for taking this awesome photo set at TcDC1 - this guy can take some pictures!

Megite Improves Personal Aggregator

Megite, an online news aggregator created by Matthew Chen, which I have highlight previously has improved its personalized news aggregator, My Megite by allowing users the ability to manage their own feed reading lists via an OPML file. Megite previously allowed users to create their own personalized news aggregator by sending in an OPML feed reading file in to Megite via email which was a very manual process. Though a great idea the previous process did not scale well as it created management bottleneck as users were not allowed to make their own OPML file updates. The new My Megite has eliminated this bottleneck. You can see mine here: Frank Gruber's Megite Personalized News Aggregator.

Techmeme & FeedBurner Help Publishers To Get Found & Synidcated

Techmeme, an aggregator of tech related news content founded by Gabe Rivera, pulls together a real-time clusters of the hottest technology related content on the web. How does a publisher get content highlighted on Techmeme? Gabe recently answered this question by saying:

1.) Focus on content
2.) Enable discovery of your posts
3.) Refer to a one of the meme sites

If you follow Gabe's advice you might be on Techmeme quicker than you think.

FeedBurner, a Chicago-based feed management company, recently launched a new blog focused on helping publishers with all of their needs called FeedBurner Publisher Tips. The vision of the blog is as follows: 

"...regularly updated site filled with pointers, little-known features, reminders and links to tutorials to help you leverage FeedBurner services to their fullest." 

FeedBurner handles content feeds for over 280,000 publishers so they have lots of experience with helping publisher of all walks of life. Glad to see they are offering up additional information in a weblog format.

Tailrank 2.0 Aggregator Rolled Out

Tailrank, the blog post aggregator, has launched a slick new interface redesign and a few additional features. According to the Tailrank blog:

"The majority of the work on this release has been on our ranking algorithms. Tailrank now breaks stories faster, cluster them better, and generally does a better job at finding the hottest news in the blogosphere."

The new Tailrank also enables a user to track each story via RSS or by AOL Instant Messenger. This could be a helpful feature with stories that get a lot of coverage and are worth tracking via IM alerts. Tailrank also introduced archives for the most popular stories of the week which could come in very handy if you miss a day or two of news. In addition to the algorithmic changes and story tracking features Tailrank is looking to expand to add new categories, like entertainment, with more to come soon. Finally, Tailrank hints at a number of new features within the next couple of weeks. It will be interesting to see what Tailrank 2.1 will bring.

Bottom-line: The new Tailrank looks much improved and will probably give Gabe Rivera's Techmeme some solid competition.

Related Link: Aggregators: Multiplying Like Rabbits

Techmeme Offers New Sponsorship Model

Techmeme, the technology news aggregator site created by Gabe Rivera, introduced a creative new sponsorship business model today (September 25, 2006). The model allows content producing web sites to purchase one of three available sponsorships slots which are handles as follows:

"A sponsor's blog feed is polled every few minutes, the latest post of which appears in its assigned slot (first, second, or third)."

So basically, you are buying real estate on the Techmeme homepage as shown below. This is prime real estate as Techmeme harnesses the attention of a highly targeted tech enthusiastic and inclined audience.

The sponsor slots are sold as follows: the first, second, and third slots are $4,500, $3,500, and $3,000 per month respectively, with a one month minimum term. Techmeme already has the first three sponsors which include oDesk, Socialtext and Wink.

I am a big fan of Techmeme so I am happy to see it generating some revenue. In addition, it is further validation to my belief that if you build a great product first you can always come up with creative ways to monetize later.