Earlier this month I interviewed Techmeme’s first hired human editor, Megan McCarthy, over on ReadWriteWeb. I think McCarthy’s job is a fascinating one and a good indicator of some future trends on the internet. For whatever reason the interview didn’t get as much traction as I hoped it would upon first publication, so I’ve decided to republish it here to make sure readers of Marshallk.com get a chance to see it as well.

One of the issues we didn’t discuss in the interview was the intersection of gender and technology. That’s one I try to think about a lot though, and if it’s of interest to you too then I’d suggest you check out this two year old article I wrote about women on Techmeme and the new ReadWriteWeb Custom Search Engine of Tech Blogs Written by Women.

And now our interview reprinted…

Techmeme is a semi-automated site that tracks the hottest conversations among tech blogs each day, with updates every five minutes. It’s one of the most innovative efforts in news gathering today. In December, Techmeme hired its first human editor, freelance writer Megan McCarthy.

McCarthy tends the gears of Techmeme, makes sure the content on the site remains of high quality and helps ensure the inclusion of new and important voices. It sounds like an awesome job and one that has probably never existed before – a half woman, half robot, news gathering machine. How can you get your blog on Techmeme? What’s in the future for the site? We asked Megan in the following interview.

The Techmeme Editor’s Job Each Day

Marshall Kirkpatrick: What do you do all day? I imagine you standing next to one of the most awesome news discovery machines available, tending it, making sure it keeps running smoothly, and looking out beyond its reaches to feed it things it hasn’t gotten to yet itself. Is that an accurate picture?

Megan McCarthy: That is fairly accurate, actually. I make sure that the news on Techmeme represents an accurate, current, and full overview of what’s happening in technology right now. So, that’s trimming back stories that aren’t relevant, adding in viewpoints that ought to be heard, etc.

Marshall: Can you tell us a little bit about your personal background?

Megan: My personal background is a little varied. Prior to [writing for] Valleywag, I bounced around a few different jobs and places and never really found a niche. I lived in Hawaii for a few years, had various office drone jobs and other gigs to pay the bills (Nanny, bartender, coffee server). But I loved following technology and reading about what was happening in silicon valley – and I’ve been a news junkie since I was young.

News Selection and Twitter Tips on Techmeme

Marshall: So, did your coming on board “break” the “objectivity” of the site?

Megan: Techmeme is biased and has been so for a while. If you read Gabe’s post announcing the addition of an editor, he makes that point.

What do you think, though? What changes have you noticed since I joined?

Marshall: I have noticed no changes to story selection, perhaps less wonky stuff. I’ve always considered Techmeme a very reliable source of news and I think you’re doing a good job continuing that tradition – but there were certainly some people who grumbled about the human touch being formally introduced, an editor.

Megan: I think some of those people might grumble about anything.

Marshall: How can new bloggers get indexed on Techmeme?

Megan: We just introduced a program where people can tip relevant posts to us through Twitter. Anyone can tip any post they think is relevant to us.

Marshall: How is the new Twitter tips program working out? I see a lot of stories go up with thanks to Twitter, quite a lot – is it changing the face of the site substantially? Changing the content?

I see a handful of people getting thanks over and again, I imagine there’s limited participation so far but how does the algorithm determine whose tips to accept and whose not to?

Also, a lot of people are sending tips regarding their own stories – is that ok? Even mainstream media outlets.

Megan: I don’t think it’s changing the content overall. Many of the stories that are tipped are ones which are worthy of a Techmeme headline. Not everything that gets tipped to us gets on the site. There are two situations that I can think of where the tip program does affect the content: It can help surface breaking stories faster, and if there are two similar stories from different outlets and someone cares enough to tip a certain one, that will probably effect which one ends up as a headline on Techmeme.

As for people tipping their own stories… personally I’m not completely opposed to it. If a writer has a breaking story that he or she wants to let us know right away, that’s a good way to do it. But, they should keep in mind that their twitter handle will be credited with tipping us to the story. If “Thanks: Marshall” showed up next to every Techmeme headline you get, people might put two and two together and think that you really like your work.

To my knowledge, the identity of the person tipping the story has no effect on whether or not it will show up on the page. It’s about the post itself.

Marshall: Well, if shame and loads of people saying “you’re an f*ing jackass” was sufficient deterrent to anti-social behavior in social media, then…[indecipherable, record of this part of the conversation lost forever.]

Megan: Ha. Is he though?

Marshall: Oh I’m sure he is. ANYWAY. Is accuracy taken into account on Techmeme?

Megan: Accuracy is absolutely taken into account on Techmeme. That’s one of my goals, anyway. If there’s a post which has a lot of buzz around it, which turns out not to be true…

Marshall: What does that look like? Are you like “Steve Jobs is NOT out at Apple, I don’t believe those reports! Story…gone!”

Megan: Or, a story that says “Steve Jobs NOT out at Apple” gets published next to the earlier, erroneous rumor.

Marshall: Then you yank the false story?

Megan: Either yank it or surround it with stories pointing out *why* it’s false. Sometimes the false rumor becomes a story itself and yanking it can be jarring. We want our readers to be able to visit the site and know what’s going on in technology – to know what people are talking about. The earlier rumor would probably be replaced as the top story by one with the correct information, but yanking it without giving our readers full context of the overall arc might be a bit jarring.

Marshall: You have to be reading a lot of these stories in great detail. What time does your work day start and end?

Megan: I start around 7:30ish and end later than that. News never stops!

The Future of Techmeme and Other Aggregators

Marshall: So, everyone wants to be an aggregator these days. All the young kids are like “mommy, I’m going to grow up to find recommended stories for an online news publisher.”

What kinds of things do you foresee becoming points of leverage for content aggregators and news discovers in the future?

Megan: I think a reliable real-time web is going to have the greatest impact on aggregation services. I’d love to be able to see stories from sites as they’re published, without a lag.

I hope that quality, accurate, and speedy stories get rewarded by receiving more attention – and that new voices are discovered and make the media chorus sound fuller and stronger.

You were asking me about my electric sheep dreams.

Marshall: Are you a cyborg?

Megan: Depends on my mood.

Marshall: At least between 7am and 7pm?

Megan: That sounds about right. This is super-nerdy, but reading an overwhelming amount of news is something that I rather enjoy doing.

Thanks to Megan McCarthy and Techmeme for doing this interview and doing the things they do each day – help us find the hottest conversation in technology. We appreciate it. You can find Megan on Twitter as well. Photo at top by Scott Beale

Speaking of OPML files, or collections of RSS feeds if you’re unfamiliar, if you’re a Firefox user you should check out BlogRovr.  I don’t use Firefox (I prefer Safari) but it’s plug-ins like this that make me doubt my decision.  BlogRover lets you upload your personal OPML file of feeds you read, along with a selection of topical feeds they offer that you can chose between and then every time you load a web page, they check to see if your favorite sources have linked to said page.  The viewing options are really nice too, but the concept – wow!  Talk about bringing it all together – yes, please – automate a quiet notification if any of my favorite sources have also written about whatever I’m reading.  Love it!

Finally, speaking of recursive online art – are you familiar with the film Four Eyed Monsters?  It’s not to be missed!  Two artists in New York date for like 6 months without speaking to each other directly, just through art.  Then they make a movie about their falling in love, video blog the heck out of it and get thousands of friends on MySpace.  Feature film debut on Valentine’s Day in theatres across the country, any city with sufficient requests via their website.  I saw it in Portland, loved it.  

The news?  Now the full feature length film is up on YouTube and movie social networking site Spout is running a cost-per-action style sponsorship.  For every person who creates an account on their site, via the FourEyedMonsters promotion, the company is giving the FEM crew $1.  I don’t know if it will work, and I hope there was a base level of sponsorship as part of the deal – but hey, this is cool news.  I urge you to create a Spout account and support these awesome indy artists leveraging online social media!   I learned about this news on the up and coming blog 901am.  I’m going to blog about it over on SplashCast this afternoon and embed the full video blog series along with the full length film.  Yay!

“Users who liked what you’ve cumulatively told me you like, also tend to like these other things.”  It’s a beautiful concept – I mean that I’ve been struck by the beauty of this concept across a number of sites for weeks.  Everyone knows that’s a big part of Amazon.com but it’s also what makes StumbleUpon what it is, too.  My favorite lately has been Pandora.

Recently I’ve heard people say things like “I worked on my Pandora ‘stations’ for months and I’m finally getting a really solid stream of music that I really, truly like.”  That kind of learning by a web service, starting from a point I designate and refining the trajectory based on thumbs up and thumbs down on subsequent movements, strikes me as fundamentally beautiful – especially when it’s music we’re talking about.  I far prefer Pandora’s interface over Last.fm’s, by the way.

The roll of cumulative recommendation versus other core systems of analysis at Last.fm or Pandora isn’t completely clear – but there seem to be two defining traits to both these sites and StumbleUpon:  The interface can be related to very simply (though more complex use is also an option.)  I get access to the fruits of my labor very quickly.

I used to use Furl.net for my social bookmarking – I miss it terribly, in fact.  Furl would look at my bookmarks and suggest not just other URLs, which were less interesting, but it would recommend other users with similar interests.  I could look at each of these and decide whether or not to subscribe to their bookmarks by email or RSS.  Back in the day I chose email; I still get those emails and the signal to noise ratio is stunning, it’s like a stream of pure gold.

It looks like MeFeedia offers something similar to this for video feed recommendations.  The fact that del.icio.us does not offer recommendations seems a huge lost opportunity to me, almost a crime of neglect against my data.  You know that companies that collect loads of my data are going to mine it for their benefit – I want to be able to do the same thing, at least on the simple level of getting recommendations relative to other users.

This post isn’t terribly coherent or carefully crafted as much as it is a series of thoughts on the subject, but no series of thoughts here would be complete without the following.  Service providers, give me access to my own damn data.  I do the work using your tools, you hold the resulting data, you monetize that data for as long as I’m happy with you, I benefit from the act of data creation and secondary impacts like better recommendations over time.  Then I find someone I like better than you and I’m out of here.  Do you get to keep my data?  Not exclusively, no!  Keep it in aggregate if you’d like – but for goodness sake, if you think that holding my data hostage and threatening me with data poverty if I leave you is a way to keep me from leaving your service – well that’s just a totally dysfunctional way to maintain a relationship.

Now I’m angry, thinking and writing about user control over our own data.  VERY few companies are hip enough to this, I don’t think any of the above discussed companies are.  Why should they be until their users insist on control over our own data?

None the less, the CBS acquisition of Last.fm is a big validation of the social recommendation concept.  I’m very excited about it and though I’ve got some big concerns, I am interested to see what a giant media company will do with it.

The primary takeaway is that the recent peace found between MySpace and Photobucket was obviously not a sign that MySpace is any more open than before to third party services thriving in their ecosystem.  They just bought the biggest one, bringing it in house.  You have to wonder whether Photobucket’s valuation was hosed minus MySpace anyway, I suppose. They were presumably bought for both their huge userbase and their innovative technology (see this TC story, for example.)

I often remind people that MySpace is more open to third party widgets than many other hosted social networking or blogging services.  Disabling outbound links in Flash media and freaking out if said widgets are monetized in any way, though, is a real loss.  If MySpace allowed other companies to monetize their monstrous traffic, perhaps just taking a cut, then the whole market would see far more innovation than it does today or is likely to given the people and adspace hording by MySpace.

No one company can be all things to all people and they shoot their own long term growth in the foot by failing to support the growth of ancillary services.  There has got to be a way to turn what they see now as a parasitic relationship into a symbiotic one.  They probably don’t get that though and will suffer for their hubris against the spirit of new social media.

I was excited when eBay bought StumbleUpon, but this acquisition today just seems sad to me.

Since the first Photobucket video I grabbed off the site contains an obviously copyrighted song, it also makes me wonder whether Photobucket is about to face some serious lawsuits just like YouTube does now that it’s been acquired by someone with money.

I blogged more about this here.

It’s just one part of one speech, but I think it’s awesome. Big thanks to John Harman of Feedia for grabbing it and cutting out these 2 of 30 minutes for me in a hurry.

Bloggers gotta stick together!

Don’t forget to see the last story I wrote too, about Google’s kinda creepy TV plans. Downloader beware about this video player, huh?

The Google Research team at last week’s Euro ITV (the interactive television conference) won the best paper award for research just posted to the Google Research blog. Their topic? Personalized experiences synchronous with mass-media consumption. That means a system where your computer listens to the TV in your living room, compresses the sound for comparison to a Google sized audio database and then offers you services online related to whatever you are watching.

This does not appear to be functional yet, but the paper also seems to assure readers that it does not require much new technology either.

Advertising? Wasn’t discussed. The examples the Google scientists provided fell into the following four categories:

• personalized information layers
• ad hoc social peer communities
• real-time popularity ratings
• TV- based bookmarks

Of course advertising can be contextual to any of those, as is shown in the hypothetical screenshot above from the Google paper. There will also be the option of selecting Two Minutes Hate worth of advertising in exchange for access to premium content. Just kidding about that part. The rest of this is real, though.

“If friends of the viewer were watching the same episode of ‘Seinfeld’ at the same time,” the paper says, “the social- application server could automatically create an on- line ad hoc community of these ‘buddies’.”

The paper assures skeptics that the privacy will be technically ensured.

The viewer’s acoustic privacy is maintained by the irreversibility of the mapping from audio to summary statistics. Unlike the speech-enabled
proactive agent by Hong et al. (2001), our approach will not “overhear” conversations. Furthermore, no one receiving (or intercepting) these statistics is able to eavesdrop, on such conversations, since the original audio does not leave the viewer’s computer and the summary statistics are insufficient for reconstruction. Further, the system can easily be
designed to use an explicit ‘mute/un-mute’ button, to give the viewer full control of when acoustic statistics are collected for transmission.input-data rates. This is especially important since we process the raw data on the client’s machine (for privacy reasons), and would like to keep computation requirements at a minimum.

There’s no mention of localized versions for China, for example. Can the US government be trusted not to demand access to this kind of data? No. I can imagine the privacy concerns here are going to be huge. People may go for it though. I am open to the idea, but I don’t think I like it. GMail’s contextual advertising doesn’t scare me though.

This seems like a recipe for nothing but shopping and superficial interaction. I suppose I could debate with people in my “snobby snobs” group about the veracity of a History Channel show. So maybe I’m wrong.

One way or the other, this seems like a pretty viable vision of the future.

The company is really going to make the most of FeedBurner offerings, customizing the links that appear after each feed item (as anyone can do) and advertising Geffen artists in other feeds. FeedBurner keeps adding to it’s list of mega customers.

The Geffen website is delightfully low key in its aesthetic. You can see the first iteration of FeedBurner feeds there now; some of the links aren’t working yet but others are. They use the standard orange icon, the words “feed” and “subscribe” (not RSS) and the “add to MyYahoo” button because of it’s dominant market share. The aesthetics of the feed landing page could use some work, but the functionality looks pretty good.

This is a smart partnership. Eventually all organizations large and small that represent artists will offer feeds for fans to keep up with news about each of those artists. It’s just too compelling a model to avoid, to allow users to pull in news automatically about their favorite artists, as part of their default web experience either in a start page or a feed reader. Unlike the spam filled world of email, news delivered by feed is just a part of our individualized web landscapes. Feed reading builds relationships. The early-adopter nature of feed reading surely has some impact on its unusually high reaction rate right now, but I don’t think that explains it all. Feeds are just plain effective.

Related news: Feed aggregator NewsGator signs an agreement to move into the Japanese market. Is your organization publishing and reading feeds yet?

Seriously though, I think the Microsoft/Qwest partnership is big. And remember, Qwest is the one telecom that reportedly did not hand over call records to the NSA. How much is that worth? Probably not much, but maybe something.

One was a 3 to 1 preference for working with teams, but doing that work from home! I have to admit, I love working from home – but I also love face to face time. It’s indispensable. I don’t think that goes without saying anymore, either.

Check these excerpts from the international comparisons:

“As for the regional differences, American professionals were more likely to enjoy working alone, and prefer to send e-mail rather than calling a person or leaving a voice mail message. They are also more comfortable with audio, video and Web conferencing technologies than people of other regions and tend to multitask the most when on conference calls.

Europeans thrive on teamwork more than their counterparts elsewhere and prefer to interact in real time with other people. They are more likely to feel it is irresponsible not to answer the phone and want people to call them back rather than leave a voice mail message. Professionals in the Asia-Pacific region, more so than anywhere else, want to be in touch constantly during the workday. As a result, they find the phone to be an indispensable tool and prefer instant messaging to e-mail. ”

Sounds like something that could behove us all to keep in mind when communicating internationally – but how true are these statements? Robin Good told me in a recent conversation that making statements about all Americans was like making statements about all fish. Personal observations re cultural differences in communication would be more than welcome…

Of all the collaboration technologies that were studied,3 three were more commonly present in high-performing companies than in low-performing ones: Web conferencing, audio conferencing and meeting-scheduler technologies. Web conferencing was cited by respondents as the most commonly present tool. (High vs. low performance was based on a split for companies based on their performance index, which was derived from items measured in the questionnaire.)