Techmeme and The Times

Earlier this year, in Feb., I posted the following:

I used to think that every newspaper site should become a news aggregator a la Topix or Google or Yahoo! News. But I’m now thinking that Techmeme offers a potentially more interesting model for newspapers. It’s edited but dynamic, and so has the vitality of Digg without the nonsense and politics.

Last night TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld pointed out:

The New York Times quietly launched Blogrunner on the technology section of its main site. Blogrunner was one of many techmeme copycat sites, until the New York Times bought it last year.

Accordingly, this column appears in the Technology section, which links to the BlogRunner site:

Presumably this will be true in each section of the Times’ website over time. It’s a smart move and continues to improve upon the Times’ already very strong site, which is now quite differentiated from the physical paper. It effectively makes the Times into a news aggregator and potentially competitive with other such aggregators. The Times’ MyTimes personal start page is another approach to the same concept.

The Times is also doing a very good job with blogging and managing the stylistic tension between blogging and formal article writing.

___

Here’s Saul Hansell’s blog post about it and the press release.

Advertisement