Have you heard of Techmeme?

This is not a post on how I just discovered Techmeme. This is a post that will make other people go “holy crap, what’s Techmeme?”

Techmeme is part of what I’m loosely netting as the “Social Web.” What it does is crawl the internet like the little search engine “bots” do, finding pages (in Techmeme’s case, blog posts and news articles), and then syndicates the “big” ones on their main page.

The result is that Techmeme is a constant monitor of what tech topic is “hot” on the web at any given moment. I check it almost every morning just to see what people are blogging about (usually it’s a New York Times article).

It’s an example of the division between human aggregation (del.icio.us) and machine aggregation - but it’s still a service that drags different people together by topic, which is a good direction for the future.