VentureBeat

When I saw a new application called Tech News in the App Store the other day it piqued my interest. After all, it combines two of the things I love most: Technology news and iPhone apps. Then I saw that it was “Powered by techmeme,” the technology news aggregation site, and I was even more interested. Unfortunately, it’s not very good, and rather pointless.

First of all, the only thing Tech News does is take the major headlines of Techmeme and list them within the app in order. There is no way to see what stories are new, and no way to see any of the discussion sub-stories as you can on Techmeme itself.

Second, clicking on one of the headlines takes you to a very short synopsis page where you then must click the “Read full article” link to go to the actual story, which loads from the web — basically, this just adds a step to Techmeme itself, which has the synopsis under the headline on the main page.

Third, and worst of all, is that this app is $0.99 despite not providing any value over Techmeme itself.

Now, $0.99 may not seem like much, but if there’s absolutely no reason to pay it, why do so? Just load up your web browser and go to techmeme.com.

“I’m pleased they equate “Tech News” with Techmeme, and wish them luck in making a little money with it. But if they make a lot, perhaps I should consult my lawyer,” Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera told me when I asked him for a comment about the Tech News app.

Perhaps he should. I kind of want my $0.99 back.

I remember the days when Techmeme was full of great tidbits and blogs with clever writing, but it seems as if something switched. Now, in order to find the more niche content that matches my tastes, I have to mine through half a page of Microsoft/Yahoo drama and speculation about the iPhone 3G.

Blogged.com thinks it can change this and challenge Techmeme and its fellow aggregators. The difference rests on the ongoing and highly debated battle between man and machine: While Techmeme and sites like it rely on algorithms to select content; Blogged uses the human brain. Unlike the human-powered Digg, Mixx, and Propeller, all of which feature content voted to the top by the wisdom of the crowds, Blogged’s content is all curated by hand. In this way, it somewhat resembles Alltop and TopNetPix. If your goal is to consume consume masses of content or navigate a hectic interface, those two might do the trick. For those that would prefer something elegant, Blogged’s interface suggests that its designers put thought into the design.

Blogged has a staff of 10 editors who spend their days mining through a database of blogs to find individual posts to feature on the site’s main pages. While many of the usual suspects all make an appearance today, I’ve discovered quite a few quirky, entertaining tidbits that would probably never land on Techmeme or get very far on Digg (see Chip Chick’s review of a highly portable Barbecue or Akihabara’s Lazy Geek’s Cushion, for example).

I found that the featured posts were well-written and worth a read, assuming I hadn’t read them or something similar already. It is with this latter fact that some of our most plugged-in readers will take issue: those that use Twitter and, increasingly, FriendFeed to discover quality content will get it much faster there than they would on Blogged. The same is true for those that rely on Techmeme: An algorithm will always outrun a bunch of editors to the breaking news and always amass relevant content faster and Techmeme’s page will always change more over the the course of a day.

Digg’s new recommendation engine, which VentureBeat’s MG Siegler found to be “good to quite good,” will also pose a serious challenge to Blogged: It’s probable that a machine that automatically matches niche content to my interests will do a better job than a handful of humans, no matter how selective they are.

But active Tweeters, FriendFeeders and Diggers are not Blogged’s target audience, anyway: The founders say their goal is to highlight quality blogs for the mainstream, a population that will be more tolerant of a post that is a few days old as long as what shows up is good. How to get to the mainstream without getting through the tech elite first is a question the founders will have to answer.

Blogged is based in Souther California and is privately funded.

updated

Robert Scoble, the tech blogger, has drawn a lot of attention with a talk about why Google is beginning to fail as a search engine, and how upstarts may eat its lunch within a few years.

It is provocatively titled Why Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are going to kick Google’s butt in four years, and here’s first video of a series (we’ve embedded it below, after the jump).

His argument is solid for the most part. Google’s search results have deteriorated because expert marketers are increasingly gaming the popular search engine. They pay for links to make their web sites more significant in Google’s eyes, and there’s no way for Google’s algorithm to determine whether a link is paid or not.

A bunch of start-ups are using human editing filters to do a better job of sorting through what Web pages are significant and which ones are not. The best ones (TechMeme, Facebook) are aggregating thousands, even millions of people whose choices can help point to relevant information. For example, if real people at Facebook talking about me tend to link to my site, VentureBeat, well, that site will show up first when you search for my name. At Google, it doesn’t. The idea is that if you can peer into, and access all the real links made by people within Facebook, and combine it with other trust-oriented sites, you’ll have a better engine.

The start-ups haven’t yet fully harnessed the power afforded them by the people that use their services, in part because they didn’t start by wanting to solve the problem of search. They’ve happened on to it. Each of them bring different advantages and disadvantages to the game. There may be more promising that the ones that the three Scoble mentions, including Wikia’s secretive project that is underway.

Scoble says Google’s algorithm is “stuck in cement,” so elaborate and so entrenched that the big company won’t be able to adapt as quickly as small companies with less to lose using a radically different approach. Google couldn’t simply buy a competitor to help it adapt, this argument goes. It would find it too complicated to incorporate the human-filtered approach into its algorithm. Google doesn’t understand social technology, Scoble continues. Google even owns social network, Orkut, but hasn’t been able to leverage lessons learned from that experience to make Google better, he argues.

The main problem with Scoble’s argument is that the upstart companies will have trouble scaling. It is difficult — perhaps impossible — to organize humans to reliably track millions of changes that are happening all over the place ever second on the web. That’s why the upstarts may be more successful organizing efficient results for only the most popular topics, which is what Mahalo is doing. The other challenge for the upstarts is that search marketers will increasingly look for ways to came their systems too, setting up spam link-laden groups at Facebook, for example.