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TechMeme gets a helping (human) handYesterday

There is quite a bit of sturm und drang about TechMeme's decision to stop relying purely on its secret algorithm sauce and hire a human editor to help make sure more relevant news tops the popular technology news site.

Founder Gabe Rivera said today in a blog post: "Only an algorithm would feature news about Anna Nicole Smith's hospitalization after she's already been declared dead, as our automated celeb news site WeSmirch did last year."

Point taken, but not accepted by uber tech blogger, TechCrunch's Mike Arrington, who argues that a human interloper may improve the site but will destroy "the objective nature of TechMeme."

For the uninitiated: TechMeme is an automated news site that clusters breaking news from blogs and mainstream pubs. It has soared in popularity since its inception in 2005 as bloggers and journalists competed to outrank each other.

The debate over the ability of humans vs. machines to do those rankings raises fascinating questions about intelligence, artificial and otherwise. It also reminds me of Devo, the 198

Push Yourself to a Healthy Lifestyle With Web Communities, ToolsYesterday

By Daniel J. Pritchett of Sharing at Work (Twitter/FriendFeed)

photo by nchenga

Has your career eased you into a sedentary lifestyle?  Are you keeping your mind sharp by tracking tech trends but losing your hold on physical fitness?  One of the big downfalls to wired life is the ease with which we can lose touch with our surroundings but the emergence of the social web is helping to change that.  Keep reading for some communities and tools that will help keep you informed and motivated in the never-ending journey to a healthy life.

Learn new exercises and proper form
Try YouTube and Wikipedia for demonstrations of proper form.  One of my favorite virtual personal trainers is YouTube's Scooby1961.  Scooby is a very modest and endearing fellow.

The Sudden Epiphany of Understanding I Received from BloggingYesterday

Update: Note that the thoughts I describe in this post ONLY apply to my blog posts. Three other authors have contributed to this blog.

Today is the one-year anniversary of my first post on this blog. Please do not read my first post, or any of the 136 other posts (not including this one), because you will be sorely disappointed.

A long time ago, I wanted to create a website where I could talk about some interesting tech-related ideas and see if anybody liked those ideas. Eventually, I registered a domain name for this blog and attached it to my web hosting account at Bluehost.

Was I successful?

Yes and no.

I’m a bit of a pessimist, so first I’m going to explain why I think I failed. My goal was to write many high quality blog posts centering around programming. The posts would include actual code examples. I’ve deviated far from my goal. With the difficulties I had with displaying code examples, I talked about other topics, such as blogging. (Although my posts on blogging and social media did get A-List blogger Louis Gray’s attention.)

I also took

Google Blog Search No Longer Indexes FeedsYesterday

Vanessa Fox reports that Google's blog search engine changed the way it indexes blog posts. Until now, Google Blog Search only indexed feeds, so the results weren't very good for sites that offered partial feeds. The site started to offer a more comprehensive search by indexing the entire content of the page, including comments, navigation links and blogrolls.

"We have changed the way we index blog posts to include the full content of the page. We've had occasional complaints about the use of the feed content, particularly the problem with partial feeds. The indexing change has improved the results for a lot of queries, both because we have the full content of the page and because we extract links that are missing from the feeds. The downside of this change is that we see more results that match only the blogroll and other parts of the page that are common to all of a blog's posts," explains Jeremy Hylton. He says that the algorithm will be improved to exclude "the content that isn't really part of the post" to make the results more useful.

Here's an example of a comment from a Google OS post indexed by Google Blog Search:

New features are on the horizonYesterday

Hey Gang,

There are some new features that we are rolling out over the next couple of weeks and here are a  few to get your feet wet.

• Improved Spam Filters & Reporting
  The ability to mark spam and a more refined spam filtering system. I know we have had a couple days of spam and this will help solve it.

• Internationalization
  For starters we will have German, Spanish, French, Russian, and Italian translations. Is there a language you’re fluent in not listed here? If you have a spare moment and would like to help translate. Feel free to shoot an email to help@disqus.com for more instructions.

• New Plugins
  Movable type and Drupal plugins.

• Updated Commenting Interface
  I will have more details on this update next week but I was really curious about what improvements you would suggest for our commenting interface? What would you change or remove? What is missing? I started a thread here to get the brain waves flowing.

Your opinion is very important to us and we look forward to hearing from you,

Giannii

Community Manager