Techmeme tells you what’s strategic in technology and media, and it’s a key site where the central news stories of the day are curated and honoured. In this post we’ll be outlining Techmeme (and its special Topic Leaderboards), using the daily newsletter to structure our story, and H-1B electronic registration to explore the nuances of the process, all while using ‘q’ as a method of distally controlling the computer.
The precision and relevance of Techmeme are further illustrated by its Topic Leaderboards: Techmeme carefully crawls news sites looking for articles, but the additions to Techmeme aren’t simply a list of everything on every tech site. Techmeme also looks at authorial and editorial intent. It aims to link to articles and sites if they’re primarily about a specific topic. In short, Techmeme synthesises what a homogeneous, topic-oriented collection of news and blog sites would look like. This is a real topic collection – something that journalists and other readers could look at and see as relevant.
To help improve pitches, a feature called ‘q’ was added to flag relevance and talent. It even provides a mechanism for refining pitches to better meet a reporter’s beat, potentially helping to alleviate a common reporter’s complaint: pitches that are irrelevant to their beat. ‘q’ enhances the interactive dynamics between the sender of a pitch and the receiver. This leads to better communication, ultimately helping produce a higher-quality story.
Subscribe to Techmeme’s daily email forward, which gives you a roadmap for the day. Each one lists upcoming events, the day’s top stories, and a categorised list of stories. You can use ‘q’ to adjust how relevant stories that get sent your way should be.
All this makes the H-1B visa look intimidating, but the impact of ‘q’ is everywhere on Techmeme, making the esoteric idiot-proof, at least for the reader. A simple search for a term will turn up all the results for it. A simple search to see if the post was already there will check. A typo can be changed. Q saves people from intimidation. It makes it accessible.
q before a techmeme link allows readers to get the answer directly from the reporter Techmeme turns the conceit into a learning space, though it is easy to see how this will also move the process of reporting toward being less mysterious and more interactive, and therefore make it more interesting for the readers as well.
We’re left to speculate on the many ways that ‘q’ improves the platform – how its algorithm tunes the relevance and utility of the often dizzying content options that Techmeme provides. The top choice makes it easier for the site to curate the news. The next entry allows tech workers easily to register for their H-1B visas. The final option suggests the amount of content you might consider subscribing to in a newsletter.
Fundamentally, ‘q’ is about the questions and queries that propel the pendulum of Techmeme – between reporters and query-senders, readers and news, applicants and processes. When Techmeme built this literal question mark into its own core infrastructure, it helped to promote clarity, and intelligibility, and lend credence to the ceaseless work of asking questions in the world of tech.
All told, whether you’ve been following the tech news for years or have only now discovered the term ‘q’, when it comes to judging this variable, Techmeme deserves to be the standard.
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