Don’t know why you’d want to, but you can now personalize Google’s famously austere search page with your own image. To make sure you understand the idea, Google (GOOG) is demoing it right now.

Too busy to verify? No problem. Here you go:

Google says this allows you to “make search more of your own.” But as Dan Frommer and other professional Web content producers note, it looks an awful lot like an homage to Microsoft’s (MSFT) Bing.

Techmeme’s Gabe Rivera takes the next logical step:

So what if you combined the two? Exactly.

But here’s a not-very brave prediction: Mediagazer, which launches today, is going to do pretty well. For two reasons:

• Like porn or Apple (AAPL) news, there’s always going to be an appetite for this stuff, at least as long as there’s a media business. Because media folks–like me–love to read about themselves.
• The people behind the site are the same ones behind Techmeme, and they’ve got the aggregation formula down cold: Build your site using other people’s work, automate as much as you can, and keep your human interaction to a minimum.

In this case, the human touch comes from Megan McCarthy, who joined Gabe Rivera’s outfit late in 2008 to help run his flagship site. The new one will be self-explanatory to anyone who’s seen the original ’meme. Or the site Jim Romenesko runs, for that matter.

Two other quick notes:

• If you’re the kind of person who notices these things–and there’s a good chance you are–you may note there’s no onanistic “Leaderboard” on Mediagazer yet. There will be, McCarthy promises–the site just needs 30 days of data to get it going.
• Given that Techmeme is as heavy on media stories as it is, there’s going to be some serious crossover between it and Mediagazer. Note, um, the Apple stories on both sites today. That’s not an immediate worry, McCarthy says, though over time, she imagines that some of Techmeme’s media stuff will move completely over to her new site.

Used to be that most of their fulminations generally went unanswered, because:

1) Techmeme creator Gabe Rivera generally keeps to himself, at least in the physical world.

2) Rivera created Techmeme using an algorithm that was supposed to automatically suss out which stories were most important, using a link-based hierarchy similar to Google’s (GOOG).

But dudes who are still unhappy with Techmeme (and yes, I mean dudes; with a couple rare exceptions that prove the rule–hello, boss–this is unfortunately a Man’s Man’s Man’s World) have someone they can vent at/to. Meet Megan McCarthy, the former Valleywag writer Rivera hired late last year to add a human’s touch to the site. Headline for his blog post announcing the move: “Guess what? Automated news doesn’t quite work.”

That doesn’t mean that Techmeme has abandoned the algorithm–just that Rivera wants McCarthy tweaking the site and making sure that important/useful/interesting stories bubble up. Or that’s their argument, anyway. Sounds right to me.

If you’re at South by Southwest this weekend, you can chat McCarthy up yourself–she’s the very tall, very pleasant woman who seems to know an awful lot of people. Or you can watch this clip, where she bravely agreed to let me hold a Flip camera in front of her face.

Important (at least to some people) addendum to my interview: When I argue that Rivera “favors” certain kinds of coverage, I mean just that–that he’s more interested in, say, Web 2.0 news than he is in gadget coverage, and that he’s set up Techmeme to reflect that.

But it includes puppets and who doesn’t love a roiling puppet-war?

No one, that’s who!

So here are two recent ones Feldman posted on his 1938 Media site, one with his Shel puppet and one using a Robert Scoble puppet interviewing Techmeme’s Gabe Rivera:

To no avail, although we did have a great debate with Techmeme‘s Gabe Rivera about the ethics and rules of blogging and (sometimes lack thereof). Conclusion: We did not always agree, but Rivera is one smart cookie. (Also, the actual cookies and churros at the conference were mighty tasty.)

In this video, we talk to some folks, including the voluble Calacanis and the guy from Mint (whose expressive eyebrows actually rival those of John Paczkowski, also in the video), the start-up that won the conference’s best-in-show $50,000 grand prize.

Also: BoomTown will soon be trying out a new camera a la that annoying hat-camera guy, so get your Dramamine ready.