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.

I know I’m not really saying anything new here, but every now and then when I look at Techmeme it fills me with despair. Well, maybe not despair exactly — but a definite sinking feeling. It’s bad enough when Apple news takes over the entire page of Techmeme headlines, but at least that occasionally involves something worth writing about, and some differing opinions. Then you have days like today, with the announcement by Research In Motion of the new BlackBerry Flip, formerly known as the Kickstart (way better name, by the way). Here’s a screenshot:

So what do we have here? A press release by RIM leading off — which I’m totally fine with, by the way — and then almost 20 sub-links from blogs and tech sites. At first I thought the problem was just a lack of smart or snappy headlines, since each one sounds exactly like the next (with a couple of exceptions). But then I went and read every single post and story, and guess what? They are almost exactly the same. Hey, RIM has introduced the Flip! Here are some pics! Here’s the press release! The end. Again, there are a few exceptions — Kevin Restivo tried to insert a bit of analysis, as did Wired and a couple of others. But the rest, nada. What exactly is the purpose of this? To grab as many cheap pageviews as possible? I know some of this stuff has to be done, like sports scores or the weather or whatever, but still. It’s sad.

This one is a real can of worms in more ways than one, but I can’t help myself. I recently came across (as many other people have, judging by my FriendFeed and Google Reader shared items) a piece by Duncan Riley at his new site, Inquisitr, in which he embarked on a fairly extended rant about Techmeme and how he believes he has been slighted by Gabe Rivera and the secret tweaks he makes to the ranking system on the site. Duncan’s overall message seems to be that he doesn’t mind — and yet, you can tell that it rankles more than a little that he hasn’t had a post appear on Techmeme in over a month.

One of Duncan’s theories (which he tosses out there almost as an aside) is that Mike Arrington’s friendship with Gabe has something to do with it — both because TechCrunch’s posts show up even when Duncan argues they really shouldn’t (because they have no links to them), and because he believes that Mike has something to do with his lack of presence on Techmeme. Why would that be? Didn’t Duncan used to write for Mike? He sure did, and Mike and the rest of the TC team said lots of nice things about him when he left to start Inquisitr — although Mike’s post doesn’t seem to turn up any more at the old link.

So what happened? No one really knows. But there are some tea leaves, if you’re into that sort of thing. Valleywag was the first to note that there was some coolness to the relationship, after Duncan mentioned a person he thought was a friend getting upset and freezing him out over a relationship with a competitor. At about the same time, Mike posted a cryptic Twitter message saying something about people he thought were friends — and Inquisitr started running company snapshots from TradeVibes, which competes head-to-head with Mike’s CrunchBase (I bet posts like this probably aren’t going to help either).

So is there some kind of conspiracy to keep Duncan off Techmeme? That seems pretty hard to believe (Gabe even makes a joking comment on Duncan’s post via FriendFeed). Gabe has always struck me as the straight-forward type — although I admit that I wonder sometimes about posts that appear on Techmeme without any links to them — and the idea that Mike would try to keep him off because of some childish falling out seems absurd. But I guess we don’t have to worry about it too much, because Duncan claims he doesn’t really care.

As a fan of Techmeme, I try to stick up for the site whenever someone writes about how it’s just an “echo chamber,” or how it’s dominated by the “A-listers” — so it’s nice to see a little empirical data from Yuvi, the 17-year-old data guru behind Statbot. Yuvi and his statistical abilities were recently re-discovered by the now-ubiquitous Louis Gray (who himself is living proof that Techmeme and the so-called “A-list” can be broken into by just about anyone if they are determined enough).

Yuvi tracked the data from Techmeme’s headlines and found that while 30 per cent of those headline links come from what might be called “A-list” blogs, another 30 per cent come from blogs that are probably on the C or even the F-list. It’s easy to complain about that first 30 per cent — and perhaps it’s even valuable to point out that a certain proportion of the blogosphere gets more than its share of attention.

That’s a good thing to remind ourselves of, even just so that we can all keep our eyes open for new and worthwhile blogs, like Corvida’s SheGeeks, or Sarah in Tampa, or the next Louis Gray. But I still think not enough attention gets paid to the other 30 per cent that Yuvi talks about — the blogs that are just being discovered. They are there — all you have to do is look for them. And when you find them, link to them.

My friend Mark Evans has a post about the lack of original thought in the blogosphere — or at least the pressures that tend to keep original thought from appearing — and as the closest thing to what MG Siegler calls a “bitchmeme” this weekend, it has grabbed a bunch of links. Dave Winer sees this as a sign that the end is near, and says he’s heading for the hills (we should all be so lucky), and lots of others have chimed in that Ed Bott was right and Techmeme is an “echo chamber” with no value whatsoever.

I know the “conversation” metaphor has kind of been beaten to death, and I apologize in advance for trotting it out again, but I think it’s the best one we have. To some, the clusters of “me-too” posts are a sign that there is no value in Techmeme.com — to which I would respond that value is where you find it. Yes, there are a lot of people posting things that just repeat what someone else said. But at the same time, there are also new bloggers coming along all the time who do add value.

In that sense, Techmeme (and the blogosphere in general) is a lot like a party or a crowd gathered at a bar. Some times there are people who are either boring, or have nothing of real value to say, or who are drunk and disorderly, or curmudgeons who sit off in a corner muttering to themselves and shouting from time to time. Does that mean you leave the party? Maybe. But you could be missing out on some great conversations, or meeting some interesting people.

Guys like Dave talk about how it’s all the insiders and the rest are hangers-on, and all that reminds me of is kids in high school, complaining about how they’re not in this or that clique, or how so-and-so always hangs out with the jocks or the geeks instead of them. The blogosphere is the closest thing I can think of to a meritocracy, and I would argue that for the most part Techmeme is as well — yes, there are cliques, but if you write a good post, it can hit the top and get links just like anyone else’s can. No one cares whether you’re tall or thin or pretty or athletic.

As I’ve mentioned before, in the clusters of me-too posts and bitchmemes and so on at Techmeme, I have found great bloggers like Frederic from The Last Podcast, MG Siegler from ParisLemon (and now of VentureBeat), Steven Hodson of Winextra.com, Jason Kaneshiro of Webomatica and others. Did I have to do some digging through useless echo-chamber posts? Yes. But that’s what some conversations are like. I’m not ready to give up on the whole party, that’s for sure.