Interesting question posited by Fred Wilson on Techmeme as a curator of feeds.  That is, that it does such a good job at curating memes that he hasn’t read many (if any) news / blog feeds these days.  The problem, as he sees it, is that it can be “gamed” as any system can, which can in turn lead to a manipulation of perception.

I love Techmeme as much as the next blogger, and I don’t really get fussed about the Leaderboard (primarily because I have never been on it, although there are other indicators that perhaps no one is really listening to my overblown gasbaggery anyway), but a couple thoughts on this:

Its good for what it does: and what it does is provide a snapshot of news and conversations for the past 24 h or so.  The problem is that it pre-picks which conversations to monitor.  As Dave Winer noted, its possible to get included into those conversations pretty easily, but its not a given to just link to the headlining meme.  Nevertheless, there are a host of bottom-sucking morays — such as myself — who like to participate in the discussion, but who that is tends to be predictable.

It could get gamed: as any complex system can.  One way would be to get several blogs — see bottom-sucking morays above, or better yet, a leaderboarder — to point to a single story or post.   Now, I haven’t yet seen anything which even suggests that this has happened, but its possible.  At one point I was writing for Deep Jive Interests, the Blog Herald and Problogger (earlier this year).  I was tempted to try it, but what would be the point in that?

It makes me lazy: as a tech blogger who needs to review a wide variety of sources, it makes me really, really lazy.  And this is a function of its leaderboard, as it naturally weights some blogs / news sources more than others.  That’s why TechCrunch can headline a story in and of itself without any pointing discussions to it, irrespective of its intrinsic worth as a story (I mean, this would be difficult to measure without any specific metric, such as inbound links).

So for upcoming stories and a wide breadth of stuff, I like Blogrunner.  It lists stories as they come out (such as Fred Wilson’s post, which I picked up within 30 minutes of him posting it), whereas Techmeme has a few hour (or few day) lead in.  Secondly, its own list of blogs / news sites that it scans seems larger, so it gives the appearance of a real diversity of opinion (whether or not such a thing actually exists in the blogosphere is to be debated for another time).  The problem with Blogrunner, though, is its layout in that its not as easy to scan the page for the headlines you want.

But as for my own leading question — have “curated feeds” stopped you from reading RSS feeds?  I don’t know.  Let’s talk about it, because I can see how for some, it might.  There’s a lot of news out there, and it takes time to build a good OPML file (why there’s no easy way to search for these things and share them is beyond me), in addition to reading it all.  I’ll admit that I’ve caved into the lazy temptation of getting others to “curate” their feeds for me, whether it be Scoble, Blogrunner or Techmeme.

Could I be getting a skewed view of things? Of course.

But I think as long as I _know_ they’re skewed … well, I think that’s all that really matters, doesn’t it?