Automation of Aggregation vs Curation Costs

A very interesting snippette on TechCrunch re Techmeme:

About a year ago, tech news aggregator Techmeme hired Megan McCarthy as its first dedicated human editor. Founder Gabe Rivera clearly liked the idea; he’s now added three more, doubling the size of the staff.

Signals two things:

(i) Pure algorithm aggregation is not efficient enough, it needs an edi.... sorry, "curator" is the New Word.

(ii) This impacts the economic scalability of the electronic aggregation newspaper story (we assume this is to give them 24x7x365 curation coverage rather than just increased story covearge per se).

So, for those of you building your E-Newsheets in teh garages, take the "Edi"...sorry, "Curator" cost line and x 3 from Yr 2 onwards.

Update - 1 day later, and a report saying that Techmeme is profitable:

However, Rivera's algorithm is still the backbone. It's the secret sauce that allows small, no-name blogs to reach the top of the pile every once in a blue moon. It does so based on a formula that takes into account who's linking to a page and how influential those sources are, Rivera vaguely explained.

But rather than code in small tweaks to the system in order to fix mistakes, as he had been doing for years, Rivera went with the human touch. He realized that "the most cost-effective thing would be to hire an editor," he said.

"The algorithmic changes continue," Rivera said. "But then once we started that, we discovered new opportunities for the two to work in tandem."

Rivera has similar projects covering politics, celebrity gossip and baseball. But Techmeme is the flagship.

"Techmeme is the product that is the most valuable, that I'm most proud of, that pays bills," Rivera said. Indeed, it's profitable and has never accepted an outside investor

.

I'm sure they have done the numbers, but its still interesting that the numbers say never mind the software, get in the wetware....