SixApart launched BlogIt by TypePad last night, a Facebook app that lets you post to SixApart blogs and other blogging software like WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr, to your Facebook Newsfeed and to Twitter all from one place. It's the kind of app that makes Facebook all the closer to being a one stop social media experience.

The service could be more fully developed but it's certainly in the lead compared to other services aiming to do the same thing. A close look at the details leads us to believe that this could be a much bigger move than it might seem to be. Here's a few reasons why we believe it's so interesting.

Tying the Social Graph Together

SixApart is a leading company in the field of social graph experimentation and the most outspoken participating company willing to be critical of some of Google's efforts like OpenSocial. BlogIt is interesting beyond its basic functionality because it can tie together confirmed accounts on Facebook, outside blogs and Twitter - then place that information in the hands of a company dedicating significant time and resources to leveraging such information in the interests of users. BlogIt may be just a beachhead landed in the hostile territory not of Facebook, but of online identity chaos in general.

Continued below.

Blog Posts to the Newsfeed

Many people want to know when 3rd party RSS feeds will be able to be ported into the Facebook Newsfeed, something the company has been hesitant to allow but put its toe in this week (see Sarah Perez's dismissal and some commenters disagreeing at Facebook's Lifestream: Nothing to See Here).

Typepad's BlogIt won't post Twitter messages to your Newsfeed, but it will post blog post links there. It effectively automates sharing your blog posts off-site with your friends on Facebook. That's a big deal. The Facebook Newsfeed is the RSS reader of choice for millions of people - they just couldn't subscribe to RSS feeds in it! BlogIt is another crack in that wall.

The Salvation of Beacon

SixApart was an early participant in Facebook's highly controversial Beacon project. Beacon broadcasts user activity on 3rd party partner sites to their friends' Newsfeeds on Facebook. Almost all of the partners were e-commerce sites broadcasting purchasing activity and it was extremely unclear whether the program was opt-in or opt-out. SixApart negotiated with Facebook to make their implementation of Beacon entirely and clearly opt-in.

Now that almost any blog post, not just those on SixApart platforms, can appear in Newsfeeds - many savvy bloggers may do their composition inside BlogIt so that their posts can gain the additional promotion to their Facebook friends. This will increase the visibility of best-practices (opt-in) in broadcasting off-site information in the Newsfeed - that's just the kind of visibility that Beacon needs.

Make no mistake, Beacon is still very important to Facebook. Though the company made a very public move in apologizing for the opt-out nature of Beacon, CEO Mark Zuckerberg still considers user purchasing activity to be the best form of advertisement the social network can display and thus key to the company's monetization strategy. If Facebook can follow SixApart's lead in the way it handles permission to display off-site activity, and if BlogIt leads to a proliferation of off-site blog posts displayed in Newsfeeds then Beacon-type Newsfeed notifications could become much more palatable to Facebook users.

This week's inclusion of user activity from Flickr, Yelp, Picassa and Del.icio.us into the Newsfeed is a move in a similar direction - but blog posts written by your friends are likely to have a higher click-through rate than less frequently uploaded photos, reviews for random restaurants and URLs being saved primarily for later personal reference. Getting personal blog posts into the Newsfeed is more valuable for all parties involved than any of the first 3rd party feed steps Facebook has taken.

Conclusion

Maybe the thoughts above are crazy, but I don't think so.

The BlogIt interface is far less sophisticated than native blogging platforms, but many bloggers will appreciate the ability to post to their blogs, Facebook and Twitter at the same time. On one hand this could end up being just another Facebook app, the vast majority of which probably weren't worth the time they took to create. On the other hand, BlogIt could be a small wedge into a series of game changing moves in social media.

Last week, Yahoo! purchased enterprise-level web analytics service provider IndexTools. Yesterday, Dennis Mortensen, COO of Index Tools, announced on his blog that Yahoo! would be setting the service free. The decision to offer a free analytics suite follows similar moves by Google and Microsoft. Google released Analytics (which we use here on ReadWriteWeb) in November 2005, drawing on software it acquired from Urchin and Adaptive Path, and Microsoft's adCenter Analytics is based on Deep Matrix, which it acquired in 2006.

IndexTools, which currently cost between $49.95 and $249.00, is now free for any current customer willing to sign a new Yahoo! service agreement. So far 3,000 customers have done so, according to Mortensen. Right now, the free version is only for current IndexTools clients, but we can probably expect Yahoo! to release a free version to the general public at the time of the next IndexTools update.

This is an important development for the analytics industry, but also for Yahoo! If Yahoo! can successfully attract web publishers to their free service -- and it is hard to see why they wouldn't be able to -- it means the ability to gather loads of aggregate data for their behavioral ad targeting initiatives.

It will be interesting to see what effect this analytics arms race has on Google and Microsoft's offerings, and what might happen if the Microsoft-Yahoo! deal goes through.

If you don't want to go through the whole process of creating a tumblr blog just to save and share interesting photos and videos you find on the web, then you may be interested in the new social bookmarking tool from We Heart It instead. We Heart It is very similar to another photo sharing and bookmarking service - FFFFOUND - right down to the heart-shaped favicon - but unlike FFFFOUND, you don't need an invitation to join.

In fact, it almost looks like We Heart It was created by someone who was tired of waiting for FFFFOUND to open up and thought, "I'll just build my own...and I'll make it better, too!"

As with FFFFOUND, items are tagged as being liked via a browser bookmarklet (which does not work in IE, by the way). However, where FFFFOUND focuses only on image bookmarking, We Heart IT allows you to mark videos from Vimeo or YouTube as well.

After you "heart" a video or picture, you can then tag it with keywords and even leave comments about why you liked it - features that FFFOUND does not offer. Images can be marked as "unsafe" and you can choose in your settings whether or not you want to see the more risque images.

Although at first, We Heart It did not display related images like FFFFOUND did, they recently added this feature which allows you find "similar entries" based on that photo's tags. However, unlike FFFFOUND, these related images do not display on the homepage and are only available if you click "Explore" to access the page for the picture that you are viewing. Even then, not all images seem to have related items, whereas at FFFFOUND, they all do. This is because We Heart It finds related items by their tags, where FFFFOUND sources words from the web site where the picture was saved from to give you its suggestions.

The images you tag at We Heart It are saved on a page called "my heart", which has its own RSS feed. This way, as you find people whose saved images you like, you'll be able to subscribe to their latest additions.

We Heart It offers a simple service but they do it well, so if you're also tired of waiting for your FFFFOUND invite, you may want to give them a shot.

Brijit, the magazine and newspaper review site we reviewed very positively when it launched in October, is today expanding its innovative platform to include very short user reviews of top articles in Digg, Techmeme and videos on YouTube. The company pays users $5 for each 100 word review of a magazine article, news story or TV show.

It's already proven to be a great way to make more informed purchases in the periodical section of your local bookstore, I look forward to using it now to find gems buried in the flood of content available on these social media sites.

How it Works

Review writers sign up with their Paypal addresses for payment, then claim "assignments" by source or topic area. Up to three reviewers can claim an assignment and each assignment has a deadline before which the review must be submitted. The assignment desk shows a fair amount of reviewer activity so far, though see further discussion of user adoption below.

The whole Brijit site is very elegant in its design and user experience. I love the ability to view the highest rated business stories in the past week, for example. I really like the whole site, in fact. Brijit is one of my favorite services that's launched in the last year. If you're an intellectually curious person who subscribes to too many magazines and doesn't find time to read the best articles, or who likes a good national newspaper and a cup of coffee on the weekends - I think you'll like Brijit too.

The addition of online social media sites is a smart one. Brijit says they will use an algorithm to discover the most interesting articles and videos to assign to reviewers. Bringing the Brijit community of well-read smarties into an editorial position relative to YouTube videos, for example, sounds like a great way to discover the really high-value videos on the site.

Seeking the Nerd Network Effect

The one down-side to Brijit is that it will be a real challenge to grow. Reading a full article on a time schedule and writing a thoughtful review, even if only 100 words, is not an easy task. That's why sites like YouTube, Digg and Techmeme leverage the simplest actions possible by their users to determine what's hot. Brijit would be a much better site if its userbase was much larger and there were multiple reviews on each item, as the company clearly hopes will happen. The company told us it saw "40% month-over-month growth for the first half of April versus the first half March" and that user growth is "accelerating." That's good news.

That said, even with small numbers of users it's a fun site to use. Small numbers of users will not sustain the kind of growth that will make $5 payments per review viable over the long term, but with enough growth and presumably some high-end advertising in the future - hopefully this site can thrive.

Below is a widget displaying the most recent items on Brijit that I've saved for later reading, just one of a number of nice little features you'll find on the site.

One of the most difficult parts of starting a startup for any entrepreneur is finding that small bit of seed capital to get things going. As evidenced by small seed funds like Y Combinator, a little can go a long way for startup entrepreneurs, but raising that chunk of change to get started can be tricky. Luckily, there are a number of different roads you can take to get from concept to Series A. Below is a list of 13 seed funding options for startup entrepreneurs.

This list is a mix of old, borrowed, new, and blue:

1. Bootstrap from revenues. You will exit for an EBITDA multiple. Forget about crazy high multiples unless you have that magic formula that really can create high growth + low costs on almost zero capital -- but if you really have that you won't need/want to exit. Don't worry about what anybody thinks other than users and customers. No, this does not have to mean enterprise products; consumer ad-supported works fine as well -- just ask the founder of Plenty Of Fish.
2. Self-fund on credit cards and a second mortgage. You are brave, maybe brilliant, and maybe stupid. Just don't expect any VC to give you more than words to recognize your courage. And also remember: it will take more capital than you think. Self-funding is not bootstrapping, it is just using your money and not somebody else's money.
3. Do consulting on the side to self-fund. This is less risky than using credit cards. One partner works for a Big Old Dinosaur on contract for $20k per month and splits it 50/50 with the other partner, who builds the company which is shared 50/50 between the two. It gets a little more complex with more than two people.
4. Rase funds from friends and family. This can augment any of the above options. Richard Branson (a man who knows a thing or two about starting companies) can help with formalizing the relationship to avoid emotional damage.
5. Already a successful entrepreneur? Self-fund from cash via your last exit. VCs will be beating down your door to co-invest. Your choice...
6. Go from concept directly to $3m Series A. Wait, you did say your name was Marc Andreessen, right? No? Oh, sorry.
7. Use angels as a bridge to Series A. This is the perceived traditional route. If the angels know the VCs that is fine, but if not, then the VCs may cram down the angels, and that's tough on you and those early investors that you've built a great relationship with. This works best if VCs tell you early, "We like the space/concept/you, develop it a bit and we'll be interested. MyFavoriteAngel can help you get there."
8. Use angels to augment bootstrapping. You have a to show a really clear path to profitability that is not dependent on VC funding.
9. Use angels as a bridge to a flip. Angels who know the target acquirers can make this a sweet deal for all.
10. Spray and pray models. A fund or incubator that puts tiny sums into lots and lots of ventures in hope of finding one star in the bag (see this post). Sounds a tad random to me.
11. Seek out founder-only evergreen seed funds. These are slightly more formalized versions of angel networks that aren't managing other people's money (i.e. LP=GP). Exits get re-invested into the fund, so there is no fixed time horizon for exit. There should be more of these.
12. Get a convertible loan from a VC to develop your concept to a level where Series A is appropriate. Charles River Ventures led the way with their CRV Quick Start program. More of these would be great.
13. Check out one of the paid links when you search for "seed funding" on Google. Not.

The good news: I planned my usual 11-point list and had to go to 13 (well 12, if you leave out that last one -- which you shouldn't). The bad news: none of these options are easy. But then, you already knew that, right?

There was a question posted on Slashdot yesterday in which the asker sought advice on an electronic cash register set up that would output sales data in an open format. While the asker was looking for information from the point of view of a shop owner, it got me thinking about data portability. There's been a lot of clamor over the past few months about who owns attention data and a major online movement has started with the aim of pushing companies into granting access to that data to the users who create it. But what about offline attention data? Should we demand access to that as well?

Data and Who Owns It

Attention data, and its cousin sales data, is very important for companies because it allows them to personalize services to specific users. By looking at your past purchases, Amazon can make recommendations about new products you might like. By looking at what you've listened to, Last.fm and make recommendations about new musicians you might enjoy. Netflix can do the same with movie rentals, Facebook can do it with advertisements, Digg will soon do it with news, etc. But the question is: who owns that data?

"Intuitively, the information belongs to the consumer, but when we look into the details, things become less clear. We explicitly choose to use Amazon, to click and to buy things there," wrote Alex Iskold in August. "Everything we do is a two way street, since Amazon provides a service and we transact with it, it seems that they should have a right to the data as well."

Even today, on this blog, we made a call for a company to open data to users. Sarah Perez called out Facebook for their timid foray into lifestreaming that doesn't allow users to export their data out of the service. And she's right, of course. Facebook's new mini-feed service would be ten times more powerful and useful to users if it didn't just aggregate outside and on site data (which Facebook will undoubtedly mine for ad targeting purposes), but also let users take it back out.

However, does Facebook have an obligation to allow the portability of all user data on the site? Even if they didn't support data portability, whose data is it? Users generated it, but voluntarily (i.e., no one forces you to put any information on Facebook), so do those users have a right to demand it back?

Real World Data Portability

But even while the debate rages online about whether sites should be required to give users access to their data, there is a whole wealth of attention data that we're creating offline as well. Should we have access to that, too? What about every movie we've rented from Blockbuster? Every book we've checked out of the library? Our purchasing habits at Costco? How often and where we fill up our gas tanks? Even where our GPS systems take us or from where we're making cellular phone calls, to whom, and for how long are potentially trackable pieces of data.

Every time I make a purchase at my local CVS pharmacy, I swipe a discount card. I do it because I get coupons back for things I purchase, and CVS can tailor those coupons to me because it knows my purchasing habits. Should I be able to have access to that sales data as well? Should CVS let me bring my sales history to Walgreens and see what coupons Walgreens gives me? Of course, that option doesn't exist right now at either CVS or Walgreens -- but increasingly it does exist online, because we asked for it. So why not offline?

There is a ton of offline attention and sales data out there. If we're demanding access to that information online, shouldn't we ask for it offline as well?

Conclusion

The answer, in my opinion, is yes: we should be asking for it. But companies should be under no obligation to part with it -- offline or online. It is certainly a great bonus when a company gives you comprehensive access to your attention data in an easily exportable format. That has a lot of advantages for the consumer, and is probably a good idea long term for many companies as well. But our dealings with the services that collect this information are generally opt in. That is, if we don't want them collecting our data, we should simply walk away.

What do you think? Does real world data portability have any merit? Do you know of any "offline" companies that offer customers access to that sort of information already?

Gainesville, Florida-based Grooveshark, a music sharing startup that we first profiled in August today launched their latest product: Grooveshark Lite. Lite is a slick, flash-based streaming music service that takes Grooveshark's huge catalog of uploaded music and makes it available to stream, no registration required. Grooveshark Lite is fast, easy to use, and free.

When we reviewed Grooveshark last August, we called it "one part Last.fm, one part Limewire, and one part iTunes store." With the addition of Grooveshark Lite, the service is now also one part Pandora.

Grooveshark is unique for a few reasons. After scanning a user's music library via the downloadable Sharkbyte client, the site puts that music online. Anyone can then download the music -- for a price. A cut goes to the artist, another to the user who uploaded the track, and finally to Grooveshark. One of the service's real strengths, though, is its Last.fm-style recommendations that we've always found to be very good.

Grooveshark Lite leverages all the various bits of the Grooveshark service -- streaming music, paid downloads, music sharing, and recommendations -- and packages them nicely in a gorgeous flash-based player. Lite extends Grooveshark firmly into Pandora territory with a service that lets users build streaming playlists and download tracks directly.

I was keen to see how Grooveshark Lite would integrate with the playlists and music I already had on the service, unfortunately I couldn't get it to properly access my library. The site did display a message today that it "may be unstable" as the company rolled out the new Lite service, so perhaps that was just a hiccup.

Conclusion

Grooveshark's service was very attractive this summer when options for DRM-free music were limited. At the time, Grooveshark was one of the few places people had access to major-label, DRM-free content in a presumably legal manner. Since that time, though, Amazon MP3 and other services have dramatically changed the music download landscape. Grooveshark is smart to extend their service into streaming music. The company also recently demoed their analytics suite for artists and labels, MoneyShark, which is another smart extension of their core product.

Grooveshark is an exciting company in the P2P music market. Along with services like Amie Street, and Last.fm (which was acquired by CBS last spring) small companies are having a dramatic influence on how music is distributed and consumed.

A new post on the Facebook blog announces the arrival of "a new way to share with friends" - that is, they're offering a way for you to import content from non-Facebook sites into your Facebook Mini-Feed and into your friends' News Feeds. This new option is being touted on the blogosphere as Facebook's "new lifestreaming feature." That is, by far, a grand overstatement of the service, which currently pales in comparison with its competitors.

This new import feature, which is, at the moment, offering the import of Flickr, Picasa, Yelp, and del.icio.us info into your mini-feed cannot even be called "a good first start" at this point. Despite promises of Digg integration in the future as well as "other sites," the limited amount of supported services only highlights what a great service this could be if done well.

And by "done well," we mean not only allowing the 3rd party info to feed into the stream, but allowing users to pull the entire stream out of Facebook, too. Two of the most valuable sources for information about the activity on Facebook - the mini-feed and the news feed - still don't offer RSS feeds for users to subscribe to, and it's looking like this much desired feature may never arrive.

Instead Facebook's data feeds only include the status updates of your friends, posted items of friends, and notifications for any user. The omission of the two most critical feeds is, (according to this twitterer) "ironic given they support data portability."

While not everyone is a fan of FriendFeed's  increasingly "destination-like" service (says another twitterer: "Facebook's lifestream FTW... FriendFeed wants you to add friends, yet again"), FriendFeed at least offers a wide selection of lifestreaming services - 35 at the moment, including the ability to import a "blog" feed, which essentially allows you to import any RSS feeds into the stream.

Additionally, FriendFeed allows export of their stream via RSS or even via a FriendFeed Facebook app, which begs the question (as this twitterer poses): why not allow FriendFeed users to just import their stream into Facebook's feed, then?

On the AllFacebook blog, Nick is decidedly much more optimistic about the new service's potential, saying

"If Facebook opens up the API for the mini-feed importing feature, Facebook will immediately become the largest competitor to FriendFeed and most likely displace it."

Additionally, he thinks that Facebook could be only one step away from adding a commenting feature to both the news feed and the mini-feed.

While that would be great, with Facebook's reticence to even open up those activity streams via RSS, it's hard to picture a time when they become open services as opposed to what they are today: tools designed to get you to visit the site and play in the Facebook sandbox.

However, all that being said, it's important to also take a look at this offering from a viewpoint outside the focus of the social-media-addicted tech community - something that MG does quite well on his VentureBeat post, "Facebook is kinda competing with FriendFeed, like it kinda competes with Twitter."

Just as Facebook's status updates are no comparison to Twitter, this lifestreaming feature is no comparison to FriendFeed, but it may be enough for the average user. Says MG:

It may be that Facebook users will be satisfied enough with Facebook’s overlapping feature being released today, that they won’t feel the need to also use Friendfeed. It doesn’t mean Friendfeed is doomed, it just might reduce its potential to grow big.

The idea of what's good enough for the average user may leave us techies scratching our heads, watching as so many great ideas coming out of our community - like Twitter, lifestreaming, etc -  get sucked up by big sites like MySpace and Facebook, offering these large communities pale imitations of the services we know and love.

However, that very well may be enough for the average user. How sad.

 

Facebook has just launched a neat new trend mapping tool, called Lexicon. Similar to Google Trends, it allows you to create a trend graph for different words and (two-word) phrases on Facebook Walls. It has a surprisingly slick UI too, with the scroll bar enabling you to zoom in and out to get different views of the trend line. You can compare up to 5 different trends by separating words/phrases with a comma.

Although Lexicon compares favorably to Google Trends, it has some flaws. In our tests it had trouble with low frequency words (like "semantic") and also it choked on "web 2.0" ("Invalid term: web 2.0. Check that each term is a single word or two-word phrase, and that each term uses only alphanumeric characters"). Also, to compare apples to apples, Google Trends has a wider range of data - including breakdowns by region, city and language.

Here is an example of Lexicon:

...and a comparable trend map from Google Trends:

In announcing this new service, Facebook was careful to emphasize that no privacy violations have occured:

"We have a cluster of computers that count the number of occurrences of every term (for example, "juno") across profile, group and event Walls every day. The system strips out all personally identifiable information so that there is no way to track a mention back to a specific person. No human at Facebook ever reads these Wall posts, and Lexicon does not look at personal messages, invitations, or any other private user-to-user communications."

Overall, it's good to see Facebook mining some of the vast data that they have - but not stepping on sensitive privacy toes while doing so.

Many people love to check out automated blog meme aggregator Techmeme throughout the day for the latest in tech news - but a considerable number of other people consider it a self-promoting echo chamber that poisons the tech blog discussion with "me too" follow-on posts and props up a handful of elite sites. (For the record, I don't feel that way.)

Today RSS aficionado Rogers Cadenhead announced the launch of a project aimed to solve the echo chamber problem. Called Meme13, we'd like to respectfully submit that the site is fundamentally flawed and we'd like to offer an alternative solution.

What Meme13 Does

Meme13 tracks the newest additions to the Techmeme Leader board, the list of sites most likely to appear as anchor links for discussion in a random sampling of Techmeme's history. The service then displays the feeds of the 13 most recent additions to the leader board, spliced together on one page.

Cadenhead says he's been tracking new additions to the leader board for the last 10 weeks and each addition to Meme13 tends to stick around for two weeks before a 13 new additions kicks it off the list of most recent. In other words, Meme13 is introducing one new site on average each day.

I found Meme13 via Steven Hodson.

The Problems With Meme13

In other words, Meme13 introduces you to a new member of the echo-chamber elite every day. How is this a solution to the echo-chamber problem people complain about? By definition the Leader Board is a list of the 100 most discussed tech blogs on the web. If you want to use Techmeme to discover new, trusted sources that are still outside the regular suspects - there are better ways to do it. (See below, for one example.)

Indeed the current Meme13 list is made up of several News.com blogs, a Fortune blog, Problogger, Jeremiah Owyang, Thomas Hawk, etc. Much as those folks are due a lot of respect, saying they are the solution to the echo chamber problem seems silly. It seems entirely counter-intuitive, in fact.

A further problem that some bloggers are liable to object to is that Meme13 displays the full text of their RSS feeds when they are available. While debate rages about such practices, I don't know why anyone would start up a new project and make a decision like that. It's probably not too big a deal, but it does seem like peeing in some one's pool without good reason to do so.

One Better Way to Eliminate the Echo Chamber

As an alternative to what Meme13 is doing, we built the following RSS feed. It delivers links to each new site that gets discussed on Techmeme, but filters out duplicates so that you'll never see the same site twice and they don't have to be big stars to make the list.

We used the TechMeme River, Dapper, FeedDigest and FeedBurner to put it together. If you'd like to subscribe here's the link: Techmeme's Newest Sources.

Here's a little bit of what's in the feed right now, though clearly the feed is busy discovering some big sites for the first time.

Recent Items in Techmeme's Newest Sources

Deeper Issues: Lay Off the Little Blogs!

I do want to take this opportunity to call into question the basic assumption that "supporting links" on Techmeme aren't worth reading. I believe they very much are. For one thing, by listing both commonly linked to coverage of a story and other participants in the discussion, Techmeme lets readers select what kind of perspective they want to read on a topic. Look at this current sliver of the site, for example.

Looking at that post, I know from my familiarity with these sources that if I want to read a quick news hit from a tools-centric perspective, the Download Squad link is where I want to go. (DS isn't small, they're at least as big a blog as we are.) If I want to read a more analytical take on the news item, with a particular focus on the context of innovation online in general - I want to read Sarah Perez's post here on RWW. If I want to read a review by a proud up-and-coming blogger, who's friends with the circle of up and comers that have rallied around Readburner but who's also not afraid to call it like she sees it, then I'll read Corvida's coverage at SheGeeks. If I want to read something detailed and referencing a number of other bleeding edge RSS related tools that I may or may not have used before - then Louis Gray is the link that I want to follow.

On almost every story on Techmeme you can find unique perspectives in the supporting links. Those people participating in discussions quite often have something important to add and there's no reason to disparage them for talking about subjects that are clearly of general interest, even if they aren't the first or most authoritative.

I remember when I first got on Techmeme, it was so exciting! My wonderful friend Barb Dybwad linked to me on AOL's Social Software Weblog, where I later went to work. When I got on Techmeme, hundreds of people clicked through and visited my little personal blog. It was a big day for me.

Some of today's up and coming bloggers are tomorrow's heavy hitting blog journalists, so don't be a jerk and call their posts on Techmeme worthless.

I you feel the need to get out of the echo chamber, but you do like the fast meme tracking capabilities of Techmeme - give our filtered feed a try. Try reading the supporting links on Techmeme too, though. They may not be on the Leader Board, but they've often got a lot to say that's worth reading.