At Tech Blog, Combining Strategies

Techmeme is a site that relies on software algorithms to collect technology news in real time into what is essentially the front page of an ever-changing industry newspaper.

But Techmeme also turns to humans to filter the ever-growing number of articles and blog posts published online each day, a method that is being used by Mediagazer, a new sister site for media industry news. Techmeme could become a model for other industries as a useful way to harness the increasingly unwieldy Web and arm readers who are preparing for business meetings or cocktail parties. Techmeme, a start-up company based in San Francisco, also publishes aggregation sites for politics, celebrity gossip and baseball, and hopes to expand to topics like business or energy. Aggregation works best for "industries where ideas can change people's view of things, and there's money on the line," said Gabe Rivera, Techmeme's founder. As the Web gets more and more crowded, news aggregators -- both general ones like Digg and Google News, and industry-specific ones like Techmeme and Politico's "early morning tip sheets" -- become essential for overwhelmed readers.