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How do other people deal with the torrent of information that pours down on us all? Do they have some secret? Perhaps. We are asking various people who seem well-informed to describe their media diets.This is from an email exchange with Megan McCarthy, founding editor of Mediagazer, an algorithm-based aggregator of media news and sister site of Memeorandum and Techmeme. Yesterday was Mediagazer's one-year anniversary.
My cell phone doubles as my alarm clock, so that's the first thing I pick up in the morning. Once I have it in my hand, I log into Mediagazer to see if any news broke overnight or if I can snooze for a bit. Then I check my email inboxes (personal and work), then my Twitter account to see if there are any stories that haven't yet been picked up by our algorithm. Then I check Foursquare, to spy on where my friends were the night before. After that, assuming I haven't had to switch to my laptop to deal with something urgent, I stumble out of bed and to the closest coffee.
Because of my job, my news consumption is very online-oriented. The homepage on my browser is Mediagazer's internal dashboard. I spend my day tracking Twitter accounts, reading emails and IMs, checking RSS feeds, and listening to a cacophony of alerts I've set up on my laptop. Mediagazer, the site I run, is an online aggregator of media industry news. We highlight the top media stories of the day from around the web and show them from multiple points of view, so you get the full context. Both Techmeme and Mediagazer (and our other sites Memeorandum, WeSmirch, and BallBug) run on a pretty sophisticated algorithm developed by our CEO, Gabe Rivera. That algorithm does most of the heavy lifting in terms of finding and grouping related stories about the same subject.