Make some of your own
Saturday, August 02, 2008 by Dave Winer.
Scoop Nisker said, famously: If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own. 
That could be the anthem of blogging. With the tools so cheap, there's no reason to sit around grousing that you don't like the way the news is reported. You can always be a reporter. What's stopping you?
Duncan Riley points out something obvious, TechMeme is skewed toward TechCrunch. I agree. It's completely observable.
At the moment he has a story that should be #1 on TechMeme, in his humble opinion. It would be if it were written by a TechCrunch person (which Riley used to be, he ought to know). No doubt.
BTW, other sites have the same story. I first heard about it on redstate.com.
The solution is to "make some of your own."
It would be a simple matter to write a program that regularly reads 20 or 30 blogs, aggregates and ranks the stories they're linking to and publishes the result. It's so simple it should be done.
I predict that if the combination of TechCrunch/TechMeme is Coke, this aggregation would become Pepsi. And once that happened, there would be a lot of grousing about how this new thing misses important stories, and we're off to the races!
Such an effort would certainly give Gabe an incentive to broaden the perspective of TechMeme, which would be a good thing, imho, for everyone.
Update 9AM: Duncan's piece appears on TechMeme.
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"The protoblogger." - NY Times.
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One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web. "Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.
"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.
"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.
Dave Winer, 53, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in Berkeley, California.
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