Daily, feeds from website Techmeme (pronounce it tech-meem) find there way to my Google RSS reader. I useTechmeme as I would Google News (to which I also subscribe), although it seems it has a better coverage of the blogosphere. Prior to starting Techmeme in 2005, Gabe used to be an engineer at Intel and now makes enough money with his site to not worry about having a "day" job (although he's not shy to show off his "free" Vistaprint business cards... every penny counts!). Currently, Gabe is alone running his self-funded site and plans to add more "verticals" (aside from technology related news) as well as social networking/community features. I just met Gabe outside the press room here at the Software 2007 conference and took the opportunity to ask him a few questions about his venture.

How does Techmeme work? There's an awful lot of engineering there and I can go forever (grin). But to summarise, it's an automated link-blog, something that just looks at a lot of sites (blogs, more established web sites and whatever have the best take on news) and tries to pick out the most interesting stories and post them. It's looking at things like links, what people are talking about, etc... the hot items. Do you choose the sites that Techmeme crawls? Not really. It's up to the software to pick the complete set of sources that are visited. However I do feed the system set of sources that are designed to tell the system "find more like these"... to build up the complete source list by looking at these at starting point. So that's how I kind of guide the editorial as the resulting set sources would tend to cover certain sphere of sites. What's the business model? No Google Ads, no network ads. The ad model is pretty neat actually: any companies that want to put their messages on Techmeme for sponsor placement would need a blog so that Techmeme posts their latest post in a special marked sponsored area. It's neat because my site is a whole bunch of headlines of different sources and so the sponsored posts go pretty well because there are also news headlines. So who are some of these sponsoring companies? Currently, it's Microsoft and Zoho. In the past, I also had Podtech, Socialtext... What would be the main competitors First, I don't think that any human link blogs can offer the comprehensiveness, the convenient layout... Maybe Google News. They have an excellent search, they cover a whole lot of areas, a lot of non English language countries... but they're not tracking what the most influential people in Tech are reporting or talking about... and when the really big stories happen, they break on blogs... and Techmeme would typically picked them in minutes and Google News would not show them until enough main stream medias would talk about it. What would you do if mainstream media asks you not to link to their sites, like the French news agency AFP did with Google News for example? (this is a question I asked Gabe while at Web 2.0 Expo) First, there's nothing illegal to link to other sites and that should be covered by "fair use". But even so, I could hire someone to get rid of these links and still make enough money.