How could you not love a blog post by a founder that says we're adding human editing to our site and goes on to say "Techmeme isn't fair because life isn't fair, and Techmeme will always be biased because humans have built Techmeme. And because news judgement, by definition, is biased."

Of course, what makes this interesting is:
a) the person who has written one of the best algorithms to manage news is now saying that's not good enough and a human will improve ir (take that, stupid computers!)
b) Techmeme is obviously making enough money from sponsorships and ads to support 3 people plus contractors (My gut is to say $850,000 a year, but it could be closer to $475,000, what do you all think?)
c) Gabe hired Megan McCarthy--a woman, and not only a woman, but someone who's written both for the tech press(Wired) and for Valleywag, the scarlet woman of the very staid Silicon Valley (more references to flouncing here.)
d) Gabe is a techie who cares--and has always cared--about news and information as well as algos (not that others don't, but I think he really gets it).

Gab sez: :Interacting directly with an automated news engine makes it clear that the human+algorithm combo can curate news far more effectively that the individual human or algorithmic parts. It really feels like the age of the news cyborg has arrived.:

Susan sez: Let's watch and see to what extent this is true.

Update: Mike A at Techçrunch says this makes Techmeme "many ways just another news site," and points out that Techmeme has had another value, letting their leaderboard be an "objective list of what sites are breaking the most news and getting other trusted news sources ("trusted" being defined by TechMeme) to link to them." 

And yes, that will be gone.

http://www.crunchbase.com/bloggerboard/tech/publications