Beet It

Is Gabe really 34 already? I guess I'm a few years older so it shouldn't be so surprising.

When I knew Gabe, I wouldn't have thought he'd be so interested to be in the public limelight as he is now. Gabe used to be far more hesitant with his speech as if he were thinking about what he was saying and saying it at the same time, with his brain occasionally reining in his speech, so that the result was half-stumbled, half-said. If you hear him in early interviews, you get that sense.

You can see, even in the interview above, that Gabe is often on the verge of cracking up, as if there's some inside joke that he's in on, or perhaps he finds the tie the person is wearing oddly amusing, before he goes back and tries to answer the question. You can tell, of course, that Gabe is pretty guarded about how he does Techmeme and related sites. That makes sense, I suppose, since it is how he's currently making a living. Would someone, hearing just snippets of what he does be able to piece together something comparable?

I'm sure Gabe would think "no", but even so, he's not going to spill the beans on how it's done.

Techmeme, in case I haven't mentioned it, is news headline aggregator. As Gabe points out, it's a bit like Google News because it's automated, but where Google applies some other algorithm, Gabe uses blogs to determine what is newsworthy.

For some reason, every interview he has seems obsessed with finding out how he does it. Perhaps it's because there's not that much to ask? If you check out Flickr, you'll see that Gabe apparently gets kissed a lot. Lipstick and Gabe's cheeks seem a perfect match.

It's surprising to me, given his interest in photography, that he hasn't posted more to his Flickr account.

In any case, Gabe seems to be improving his interview skills. I doubt he'll ever get to that super polished stage (the guy who is interviewing him is almost slimy smooth, not like, say Steve Jobs who somehow surpasses that, and doesn't seem quite as slimy).

Next time you meet up with him, ask him about dwarf tossing. He probably won't get it entirely, but it's a bit of an in-joke.