DISQUS

louisgray.com: louisgray.com: Scooped: Who Brought the Story to Techmeme First?

  • GabeRivera · 1 year ago
    Cool. One note: Twitter was initially called "Twttr" and Biz Stone (of Twitter) had the first post: http://techmeme.com/search/query?q=twttr&wm=false
  • Louis Gray · 1 year ago
    Thanks Gabe. This has been updated in the post now, showing both Twttr and Twitter. Good catch.
  • Ben Metcalfe · 1 year ago
    Hey Lois,

    I can't believe I was the first person to break the news about Twitter, in fact I know I'm not. But great work none the less - and interesting and original idea for a post!
  • Louis Gray · 1 year ago
    Ben, thanks for the note. You may not have broken the Twitter news, but according to Techmeme, you were the first one to mention it and have that post reach Techmeme.

    See here: http://www.techmeme.com/search/query?q=Twitter&...

    If I missed one, I'm happy to update.
  • Ben Metcalfe · 1 year ago
    sorry, I meant "Louis" of course. Mis-spelling someone's name is particularly embarrassing, sorry.

    Been Metclafe
  • Louis Gray · 1 year ago
    No problem. #1, I knew who you meant, and #2, I endured plenty of Lois comments in elementary school, and am therefore, immune to it.
  • Mark Krynsky · 1 year ago
    Interesting info. I decided to check on Lifestreaming which had it's first mention on Aug 7, 2007 in a minor story about a Firefox add-on. I had been writing about Lifestreaming since Feb of 07, and others wrote about it before me. I'm not too sure what that says except that some stuff can build under the radar for quite some time before reaching Techmeme.

    I also, I wrote a review of Profilactic in August of 07 which is about 8 months before the mention you list above. So Techmeme is a great service, but I think to find some breaking early adopter moves you need to consider looking elsewhere. There are many new services that trickle stuff up much quicker nowadays.
  • omerhorvitz · 1 year ago
    Cool. Another note: to see beyond the first 1,000 results of a high-yield query, simply "break" the query into date-restricted chunks; John Naughton of the Observer had the first iPhone post:

    http://techmeme.com/search/query?q=iphone+date:...
  • Louis Gray · 1 year ago
    That's a smart work-around. Why didn't I think of that?
  • alan p · 1 year ago
    @ Louis - nice bit of analysis - now, since you are "in the groove" analysis wise ;-) , it would be interesting to test another two hypotheses - ie that Techmeme story origination has narrowed over the 3 years to a smaller subset of both (i) contributors and (ii) storylines.

    (I suspect that (i) causes (ii) as well )
  • Louis Gray · 1 year ago
    On that type of real analysis, I'd lean to Yuvi Panda of The Statbot. He just wrapped up a series of analysis on Techmeme sources, which you can find at http://thestatbot.com/. He does a great job.
  • Yuvi Panda · 1 year ago
    Wow. *Bow*
  • GearsofPeace · 1 year ago
    This is very cool. I wonder if we'll start seeing a bit of the DIGG controversy rising from this-where certain power users get all the clicks to stories, even if a smaller blogger breaks it first. Hope you keep researching this!
  • AlexHammer · 1 year ago
    This is a fascinating post.
  • jeremiah owyang · 1 year ago
    One has to ask, why is breaking the news first important? Isn't it more important if it tells us what it means?
  • Louis Gray · 1 year ago
    This isn't claiming "importance", per se. It's _very_ likely in some cases that a story may have been broken at a different source, often a smaller blog, but it took somebody like TechCrunch, RWW, Valleywag, etc. to push the item to Techmeme.

    Being first with a story says that the source is a place you can go to find news prior to it being analyzed. Your job, as an analyst, would be the latter half, and that's your role, where you place importance.
  • Corvida Raven · 1 year ago
    Then how about how many of these networks and sites gave credit to their original source (if there was one)?
  • alan p · 1 year ago
    I resemble that remark, coming from a "small cap" blog that has seen stuff re-appear elsewhere a few times ;-)