I bet Gabe is watching for evidence of gaming and then removing anything that doesn’t belong.

The item in question, Photowalking, appeared for a few minutes (you can see it on the TechMeme River, but not on the main site) but then quickly disappeared.

Personally I would have removed it too. Thomas Hawk and I are friends. It got onto TechMeme cause both Thomas and me linked to it. We weren’t trying to get it on TechMeme, just both organically linked to it (we’re both involved).

Anyway, I’ve seen other evidence that a human is changing the results behind the scenes too. We’ve started talking about this at parties and, invariably, we think it’s good that Gabe’s doing that. Why? He’s good at picking what’s really interesting and what’s not.

Gabe, for his part, says that it’s his algorithms that decide whether something is worth staying on the page.

I wonder what the truth is: I’d love to sit with my camera and watch Gabe all day long and see what the system looks like to him. I bet he’s learning a lot about the linking patterns, and other patterns that are going on in the blogosphere.

By the way, it’s fun to compare the TechMeme river to my link blog. I notice that Gabe usually beats me with his algorithms, but that I can still beat him one out of every few stories. Why? Cause I am just looking at whether the post is interesting to me, not whether or not it has some inbound links. Funny enough usually within an hour the best of my “finds” are also on TechMeme cause they earn enough links from other people to get onto that page.

UPDATE: Now it’s back, that’s weird.

UPDATE 2: In related actions Digg is removing entire domains from its service.

UPDATE 3: It’s gone again.

UPDATE 4: Gabe says he doesn’t mess with the site in my comments and is on vacation right now with his family (but, says, that we should expect more of this kind of behavior).