Techmeme mostly has human curation and a little bit of automation, though it is hard to tell from the outside how much that factors in. Human curators also rename article titles to provide a summary of the contents in an attempt to save you a click if you don't want more detailed information.
rschroed|9 years ago
At the very least it seems like the clustering is algorithmic and "most" of the ranking.
Source: Too lazy to look up the 6 year old article that I kinda remember talking about this.