Jason Calacanis announced a new proof-of-concept site called Launchticker today. At first glance it’s just an overloaded Google Doc with a bunch of tech news summaries and links streaming down the page. Look at the blog post explaining the site though and you’ll see there’s a lot more going on here. It’s an attempt to improve on the fabulous half-human/half-machine edited tech news site Techmeme. Specifically, by limiting the areas of editorial coverage to startups, technology and features – excluding a lot of financial news, hardware and maybe enterprise stuff. It’s the tech news Jason Calacanis cares about and his taste is probably reflected in a lot of other peoples’ tastes too.

Just like Calacanis’s tech news site Launch helps pull in traffic that converts to promotion of his startup conference Launch, so too will this new tech aggregator serve as content marketing for other money-making business concerns.

In the meantime…what a lot of fun! The Google Docs delivery is just a stop-gap until Calacanis can hire an engineer to build a Content Management System for the site, but the basic idea is awesome. He’s hired two really experienced, worldly looking women to do the story discovery, curation and summarization: Megan Rose Dickey and Kirin Kalia. (Incidentally, I think it’s a little distasteful that neither of these women are named but their salaries are made explicit in the announcement blog post in order to prove a point that an experiment like this doesn’t have to be expensive.)

Kalia and Dickey will apparently work around the clock racing to find the best news originally reported elsewhere, to summarize it on the web and then also deliver it each day at 3:00 in an email. How many of us have fantasized about building and running a system like this? Original reporting is of course essential, and maybe some of that will come through the Launch Ticker as well – via the Launch blog at least – but the adrenaline of competing to get one step ahead of other aggregators to find and then pack as much added-value as possible into an alert about the news is a different, if related, experience.

European news editor Robin Good used to write all the time about a concept he called Newsmastering. He imagined it becoming an essential role inside of every company. A little like what we call Content Marketing, but focused on curation and pointed inward, not outward to the public. I still think it’s an awesome idea, it may prove ahead of its time, it may be right around the corner, I don’t know. Below, from Good, to be read aloud in his captivating accent.

Newsmastering is the ability to identify, select, aggregate, filter and distribute/publish news and informatiom streams on very tight, specific themes/topics.

Newsmastering is a new emerging and much needed network function allowing the huge news flow to be categorized, filtered, de-spammed and re-routed and contextualized in one one thousand and more ways.

The output generated by a skilled and qualified newsmaster enables a great number of individual to avoid needing to subscribe to tens of RSS feeds or to having to visit multiple sites daily to keep themselves on top of the latest relevant news to their specific field of interest. The newsmaster aggregates and compiles very high-quality news feeds which completely replace the need to visit or subscribe to large number of RSS feeds, suddenly providing those same individuals with much greater time available to them and much higher quality up-to-date news available to them at all times.

People are doing a lot of this publicly now, not inward facing. It’s not just Huffington Post aggregating and advertising. Some examples to check out:

• Evening Edition, just announced by Mule Design, a single human editor summarizes the day’s political news each evening. Thanks Todd Barnard for finding this, as he finds so many things I’ve never seen before.
• Reuters now curates and comments on financial news at Counterparties.com, edited by the fabulous Felix Salmon and powered by content discovery startup Percolate.
• Remember real-time search engine Collecta? Serial smart-guy Gerry Campbell is now working on a high-end financial news curation as a service startup called VitalBriefing.
• Laughing Squid has been capturing news of the weird and wonderful for years. Traffic gets converted to web hosting customers!

How many of these can prove as awesome as Techmeme? Gabe Rivera’s site has been using machines melded with human minds for more than 3 years and is going to be tough to beat. He’s got such a consistent format though that I think there is room for other startups to come in and challenge that site, or co-exist, with very different methods and presentations. See, for example, the incredible story of the 19 year old who created Breaking News Online.

It’s an incredible time to be a news geek. Who can be fastest, smartest, best, add the most value, exercise the most compelling editorial judgement, capture social experiences and build a loyal audience? The game is on!

How do we at Plexus Engine relate to this? Besides jealousy that all these people have actually launched their products, someday they’ll all be our customers.

I just read a really good post about a startup that felt unfinished, because there was no mention of critiques of the company’s product or business. I’m not blogging about startups these days, I’m building one, but in the bloggers’ spirit of telling other people how to do their jobs, here are some things I believe every post about a startup should include, if possible.

• Info about the founding team’s relevant background. This is something Michael Arrington taught me was an important part of every startup’s story. Reading Roger Ehrenberg’s thoughts years later about how a founding team’s background illustrates what skills they won’t have to spend the time to learn from scratch helped me understand why all the better.
• Mention of the company’s business model. They say business is the ultimate sport, would you report on a game pitched full of curveballs without mentioning that?
• Discussion of the market and competitors. Who else is in this space? It’s one thing for a blogger to make an assessment of a company’s viability, but I think it’s important to point the reader towards enough information about competitors that they can make their own informed decision, too. Many people have said over the years that tech blogs are so poorly written their only value add is in discovery of cool companies to follow the links to – in that case let’s link to more than one per article!
• Thoughts on a company’s meaning, its place in larger trends and what it points to in the future. Richard MacManus taught me about adding that kind of value.
• Links to previous coverage, on your blog and on other blogs. It’s a good value add for readers and it’s fair play to recognize those who wrote before you. I always use a Custom Search Engine made up of the archives of the top tech blogs to search for previous coverage of a company I’m covering, as well as to learn about competitors.
• Critiques. Every product and company has its critics. If you’ve used the product yourself and can talk about it from personal experience, all the better. I don’t think blogging/journalism has to be objective or balanced but if there’s not some inclusion of critical perspective, I don’t think the post is finished.

That’s my list, off the top of my head, of near essentials. Some blogs do better than others at including this kind of information – and I certainly haven’t included it all in all the posts I’ve written either. Sometimes you just run out of time and have to press that publish button.

After years of resistance, I have decided to take the time to create a Facebook Page. It’s here. If you are interested in all things about the future of the Internet, and you use Facebook, I hope you’ll join me for conversation there.

I’ve had a lot of issues with Facebook over the years, I wrote a big critique of the company’s data sharing partnerships last week, but I also have a lot of admiration for Facebook. I can’t go into great detail about that now because I’ve got a lot of work to do, but I hope you’ll join me there if that’s what you’re into.

Leading tech and marketing analyst Jeremiah Owyang wrote a blog post today that has inspired some interesting conversation; he argues that with the recent departure of a number of the key big names in tech blogging from their posts, the Golden Age of Tech Blogging has passed and it’s a new era. He cites my leaving RWW among others, though I haven’t entirely left. (I’m just focused on building killer research mega-tool PlexusEngine.)

Many people believe that no such change is happening, either. There’s a continuum of constant change, but tech blogging has never really been about just TechCrunch, Mushable and ReadWriteWeb. There are many other important tech blogs, always have been and always will be. ReadWriteWeb 2.0 is going to rock, too, by the way.

Either way, things are certainly changing. There are opportunities for new blogs and bloggers to rise into leadership positions. I thought I’d take a few minutes and offer three bits of advice about things I think could help make the new era of tech blogging even better than the last one. I just think these things would be nice.

Outbound Links

It’s sad that so few tech blog posts add the kind of value that can be added by including links to high quality off-site resources. It’s ok to send readers away, they’ll appreciate the pointers and they’ll come back. Some of the biggest sites on the web just aggregate links to other sites – why not combine that form of value with original content on blogs? Not only are the links valuable for readers, the research required to assemble those links is a big value add as well. Compiling research and links to other sites is a fine art. I know everybody wants to see more of this. Who on earth would believe that a single blog post’s author knows everything a reader wants to know about a topic?

This isn’t just a matter of principle, either. Outbound links can be good for search engine traction, though that’s not 100% clear and it’s not clear how much weight they carry relative to inbound links. As Google’s Maile Ohye said several years ago, “Thoughtful outbound links also help your credibility because it shows that you’ve done your research and have expertise in the subject manner. You visitors may therefore want to come back for more analysis on future topics.”

Research, Including on Company Founders

One of the things I learned from Michael Arrington when at TechCrunch is that it’s always important to look at the backgrounds of founders of companies you’re writing about. Almost no one does that anymore though, I too often forget myself, but it’s so often a missing part of the whole story!

As VC Roger Ehrenberg once wrote, “There can be tremendous inefficiencies as founders ascend the learning curve, especially in areas that are not necessarily related to or interesting given the founders’ backgrounds.” Conversely, a founder’s background experience indicates the ways in which they are most likely to be particularly efficient.

The time and pageview pressure these days leads to short blog posts based on little more than the first impression of the blogger was left with after looking at a website themselves. It’s like the what, the why and the when of a news story gets adressed but the who gets too little attention.

Platform Implications

One of the things I have learned from Richard MacManus at ReadWriteWeb is that news is always more interesting when you adress the long-term platform implications of anything. When might a certain app, trend or news development make possible in the future? That’s one of the most exciting parts of the story.

A contrary perspective is that, as investor Rob Go has written, the word Platform could be “the most meaningless and overused phrase that entrepreneurs and investors try to use to make companies seem more important than they are.” Maybe, but from a journalistic and analytical perspective, thinking about companies as parts of trends, which will hopefully lead to future opportunities, seems like something that can never be a bad idea.

Maybe all of this is just a way to say “I think tech blogging should be more like the way I like to do tech blogging. But these three ideas sure would help make the next era of tech blogging even better, I think. Maybe no more listicles, too. (Blog posts with numbered lists! Ha!)

Related: How to Quit Your Day Job and Become a Professional Tech Blogger

For what it’s worth, I should mention that all the outbound links in this post were added lickety-split with the help of Plexus Engine. Sign up now for beta notification – it’s coming along really well!

From the conclusion to an email I just sent an entrepreneur and incubator seeking coverage. Seems like a really cool startup and I’m not going to be mean about it this time – but I don’t think I’m being unfair to say this isn’t really how it works.

Startup emails me all the details about what they are doing and then says “oh by the way, this is embargoed until Monday.” Nice to meet you, too! 😉

Fwiw, this is the 2nd [unnamed incubator] startup in the past few weeks who has written to us and just asserted an embargo we haven’t agreed to. It would be great if this post and the post it links to was read by your people: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/we_will_respect_your_embargoes.php

In short: if I don’t agree to an embargo before you give me info, then I presume you’ve reached out to others who haven’t either. That means I have a. no verbal contract to wait until the asserted embargo time and b. no reason to believe that other media outlets will wait. That means it is in my interest to write now and be first.
That’s how I understand it and I know I’m not alone.
best wishes,
Marshall Kirkpatrick
ReadWriteWeb

I found my first news tip on Google Plus today, that Google had acquired Fridge. Dain Binder of Computer Sciences Corporation shared a link to the Fridge blog and that’s how I found out it happened. I went into my Custom Search Engine of competitors and found that +Liz Gannes had written it up on All Things D an hour prior, and Mashable 15 minutes prior. (Later, I think I noticed that Biz Insider posted 2 hours prior). And then I wrote it up. Paused before publishing, gave it what I think is a much better title than originally planned (Google Plus is Eating Startups, instead of Google is Buying Up Startups to Bolster Plus Social Network) and there you have it.

I think I remember the first story I got thanks to Twitter; I believe it was a +James Governor tweet that Google had acquired +Jyri Engeström ‘s Jaiku. Twitter quickly became key in my work. And it still is today.

I also remember the first story I ever got to first thanks to Quora. Eighteen months ago I was organizing an event for RWW and decided to ask on that hot new social network, “when is Twitter’s rumored first developer conference next Spring? I don’t want to schedule a conflicting event.” +Ashton Kutcher answered the question! With the correct date! It was awesome, so I didn’t schedule the event that day and in fact I wrote up the news: Twitter’s first dev conference is, according to the site’s then #1 most popular user, going to be on April 14th. And indeed it was.

I used to break a lot of news stories first using RSS to IM/SMS alert tools, and I still do sometimes – that’s how I got my job as TechCrunch’s first news writer. Strategic use of tools helped me get to news stories faster than Michael Arrington – so he called me and hired me. Now everybody uses those sorts of tools so you have to be extra crafty to figure out how to win with RSS.

I wasn’t the first on this story on Plus and I bet some other people have broken stories on here already. (I roughly broke the story of the Circles feature at SXSW, but that was all shoe leather and beer, no web tool hacks on that one.)

I just thought I’d post a little note, marking today as a little milestone for me and thinking out loud about how I want to try to use this platform for work in the future. Thanks for being my Plusbuddies, everybody, hopefully we can figure it out together. If you’d like to connect on Google Plus, I am here.

A number of prominent web personalities have announced that they are going to redirect their personal blogs to their Google Plus pages – because they get so much more interaction with readers when they post there. I can understand that, but I’ll never do that with my blog. I have 3 times as many connections on Circles as I have RSS and email subscribers here (in 2 weeks, vs 5 or 6 years!) – but I’m not tempted in the slightest to give up what I have here. Perhaps it’s just about trade-offs and I’m not willing to give up the control I have over the way my personal site communicates with visitors.

I’ve got important things in the sidebar of my blog, for example. I like having my contact info, bio, links to information about my consulting practice and my media citations sitting right next to every article, no matter what readers came here to read. I don’t want to lose control over my own Information Architecture, no matter how under-developed it is, to Google’s vision of “posts in one tab and about page in another.” I want to put those things where I want, in the order I want and make them look however I want.

I’ve got some of my most useful posts on this blog pinned in the sidebar as well. Several of them are 3 or 4 years old. In the Plus world, those would be washed so far down the stream!

I like being able to choose what commenting system I use on my blog. I really like using Disqus because I can click on any commenter’s avatar and see what other Disqus-using blogs they comment on and how often. That’s a great way to get a quick picture of someone’s community of participation.

I like offering a search box, I use Lijit that searches my own personal blog archives and an extended network of sites I’ve identified (my tweets, my bookmarks, some of my favorite RSS subscriptions). I really doubt Google Plus will ever enable something like that.

Google Plus doesn’t have RSS feeds, or email subscription options. Both are important to me; I want to speak to my readers however they want to be spoken to. Some day, we’ll be able to write to and read from any platform in any other platform, just like we can call one phone network from inside another phone network now.

Rather than chasing people around from one platform to another, where they prefer to spend their time, I’m going to sit right here on a site I own and wait for the future to become interoperable with me!

WordPress plug-ins, the iPhone publishing app, the open source community, but more than anything my own control over how I present my self to the world – all those things are very important to me.

I do love Google Plus, though, and if you do too – here’s my profile there that you can add to a Circle so we can be Plusbuddies.