Are you fascinated not just by the media, but by all the ways in which blogs, Twitter and other forms of “social media” influence the news as it develops over time? Then Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera wants to hear from you. According to this posting on Craigslist (which I found via a Twitter link from Salon founder Scott Rosenberg), he’s looking to hire someone to fill a position that has never really existed before, and one which in many ways could never have existed before the Web came along:

“We’re not sure what to call this position. News Technician? News Analyst? Configuring Editor? The role involves interacting with an automated news-picking computer algorithm, configuring it and prodding it to ensure balanced and comprehensive coverage of important news topic areas. It’s the kind of job that possibly has never existed until 2008 but will become increasingly important in the years ahead.”

Anyone who has followed Techmeme for even a week or two will notice that the links and sub-links on the site are continually shifting over time, rising and falling not just as the importance of the story changes but as the links between the various sub-posts change. How does it work? Only Gabe knows for sure, which drives some people around the bend. I know that I’ve been fascinated with the way Techmeme functions ever since I first laid eyes on it a couple of years ago, and so have many others.

I know from hints Gabe has dropped here and there that it isn’t an automated process. Although algorithms are involved, I’m pretty sure that Gabe spends a lot of time tweaking things here and there, and it sounds like this new job will involve a lot of that. Among the required skills are:

- You should be a news junky or former news junky.

- You need a deep understanding of how news works online today. Thus, familiarity with blogging and the ascendant news sites. You must have a good sense of what’s newsworthy, what interests news readers. You should understanding how services like Twitter and Facebook fit into the picture.

- An understanding of modern web technologies and concepts: RSS feeds, feed readers, urls, permalinks, browsers, IM, social networks, etc.

Techmeme gets criticized for being too insular, for perpetuating the A-list echo chamber and for a lot of other things, both real and imagined. Is the site perfect? Hardly. But as far as I’m concerned, Techmeme and its siblings — including the political site Memeorandum.com and the gossip news-filtering site WeSmirch.com — are the pioneers in what you could call the “real-time front page” business, where you can watch news and opinion, and the relationships between them, shift and change literally by the minute. That may not be the future of online news, but it’s a pretty important part of it.

Surfing through my feed reader this morning, I came across a post from Kareem Mayan about why he left a job at Fox Interactive Media (the News Corp. unit that controls MySpace). The bottom line — at least from my reading of his post — is that while he got to do some interesting things at the company, he just didn’t feel challenged or motivated.

Kareem, who I met at last year’s mesh conference and is originally from Toronto, is a smart young guy who I’m sure lots of companies would jump at hiring. But he left to run a small startup that is working on something in the field of education. Why? Here’s what he says:

“After too many days of being miserable, I realized it was because I wasn’t happy with my job. I was earning a lot of money, had just gotten a promotion, lived in a beautiful apartment near the beach with my rad girlfriend, but none of it was floating my boat.”

If you’re a big company like FIM or News Corp., you need people like Kareem — but you are destined to lose them because doing something challenging and meaningful means more than having a big job with a fancy title and a nice raise or a corner office.

Just one thing, Kareem: Can I have your beautiful apartment near the beach? :-)

Facebook is a great service — my 17-year-old daughter and all her friends use it (I have an account too), and so does my cousin who is at McGill University in Montreal, where she engages in the typical sort of debauchery expected of second-year college students, and then posts pictures of said debauchery on her site for all her friends to see. I warn her about that from time to time, because you never know where those pictures are going to wind up.

What got me thinking about that again was reading on Engtech’s blog about a couple of employees of Farm Boy in Ottawa who were fired as a result of some stories they posted on a Facebook group, one of which allegedly involved theft from the store. There are more details in the Sun story, but in any case, they were fired despite having what was reportedly a stellar record at the store.

They were also fired despite the fact that Facebook groups are private, and you have to be invited to get into one. Similarly, Facebook profiles and pictures are not viewable unless someone invites you. However, in what was probably a poor decision, they all used their real names — and, as Engtech points out, one of them was fairly distinctive. That made it pretty easy to track down who it was. This kind of thing has happened before and likely will again.

Update:

A story from the Globe about well-known weatherman Percy Saltzman, who passed away recently, shows that it’s not just teenaged bloggers that need to think about the impact of what they are writing — 91-year-old weathermen might want to think about it a bit too.