What does an algorithm think? 

The only person who knows what it means to be on Techmeme is a former roommate of the person who has always been at the top of every list ranking popularity on Techmeme. I'd rather be judged by people, not code, but if we're supposed to accept the judgment of code, there should be more than one person who knows how it works. And when it says consistently that the author's friend is #1, that's kind of fishy, murky, two bit, Karl Rove. Alberto Gonzalez, third world, banana republic, cheap.

Further, to call most of the posts that show up on Techmeme "tech" is a bit of a stretch. Most of the authors don't know the first thing about technology, never took a computer science class, have never written code, and don't admit that understanding tech is a prerequisite for writing about it. Further, most of the articles that get linked to by Techmeme aren't about technology, they're about who's buying who, or who's on top of who, or advertising, bubbles, PR, linkbait, etc.

BTW, I temporarily turned off Techmeme so no one can say I'm trolling for links from Techmeme.

A new kind of Twitter outage 

I wasn't sure there was an outage until I read this post on ParisLemon and then this on CNET. I noticed it last night when I came back from a seder after posting a picture from a gas station with a very funny name (or so I thought). Usually when I post a pic to Twitter, even a boring one, even in the middle of the weekend, between 300 and 400 people visit (Flickr keeps track). This time only 60 people had clicked on the link.

Same thing happened with a picture of Wikimedia Foundation lawyer Mike Godwin that I took at the French Hotel in Berkeley yesterday, and a post-seder movie walk through an amazing candy store in Lafayette, taken with my new camera (it takes great movies too).

I also noticed that some of my twits from Friday night were gone. And I had said some controversial things that no one had agreed with or objected to.

Usually when Twitter goes down you get a screen saying it's gone, but this is a new kind of outage, and obviously not a good thing.

ReadWriteWeb turns 5 

Congratulations to founder Richard MacManus and the team at ReadWriteWeb for achieving five years of technical excellence.

Keep up the great work!