Gabe Rivera and Steve Kovach Talk Techmeme, Content Curation

What do you get when you stick the founder of Techmeme (a site that uses an algorithm and human editors to bring readers the latest and greatest tech news) and the editor of Business Insider's SAI (Silicon Alley Insider) in a room together? An in-depth discussion on the role of skilled editors, technology, and the general public when it comes to collecting and disseminating tech and business news - a.k.a., content curation.

It all went down at Outbrain's HQ during a Content Conversations event cohosted by Contently (you can find more information about the Content Conversations Meetup group here). The goal? Find an answer to the question: Is curation an art or a science?

After a lively networking session, Steve Kovach (SAI) got right down to business grilling Gabe Rivera (Techmeme) about the topic. Although Gabe admitted that most of Techmeme's content gets pulled from RSS feeds or scraped from other sources (science), he made the surprising argument that he found it cheaper and more effective to have editors produce the final results by processing the data generated by his algorithm.