Gabe Rivera, founder of TechMeme (until recently TechMemeorandum, a name that some people found oddly difficult) held a meet-up in the DC market yesterday at a Rockville, MD restaurant called Urban Barbecue.
Ever since Robert Scoble (soon to be an ex-Microsoft employee, as everybody already knows) gave a big nod to the smart one-stop media and tech news site last fall, TechMeme has become the first place that Silicon Valley and the press check every day to find the latest news. I spent a decent amount of time talking to Gabe yesterday, as nice a person as you’d want to meet (see photo, courtesy of another meet-up attendee, Clarence Wooten, Jr., head of Collectivex.com).
More than that, however, he truly wants to push the blog/website intelligent aggregation envelope — his recurrent questions to the meet-up attendees were mostly about how to make TechMeme better. For such an unassuming person — he probably hates that I’m even doing this blog item — he’s built up an impressive stable of highly trafficked sites including not only TechMeme (which today ranks 19,316 on Alexa) but also his original site devoted to politics, Memeorandum (Alexa rank=11,982).
His latest ventures are a gossip aggregation site WeSmirch (71,155) and baseball fan destination Ballbug (161,340). Despite the mounds of traffic Gabe generates, he has yet to monetize any of his properties, although I’m sure he has had a lot of offers. One thing he said: he’s hunting for an innovative way to generate ad revenue across his sites, some means of selling sponsorships that is in keeping with the Internet “edge” his sites already occupy.
Cynthia Brumfield at 1:54 PM|Comments(0)
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