TechCrunch has the scoop on a big new feature launching tomorrow evening at the tech-blog meme aggregator Techmeme (minus buzz words, it's a news tracking site). The new Techmeme leaderboard will list the top 100 blogs that have appeared as headline links on Techmeme over the past 30 days. The page will be at http://techmeme.com/lb, which is currently password protected. In a preview image, posted below, TechCrunch was the top blog on Techmeme last month and Read/WriteWeb was #6.
We're in great company on that list, and it looks better than the Technorati 100, where we're now at #22 - but this Techmeme leaderboard will face some criticism as well. I love Techmeme, I've checked it multiple times an hour since it launched in 2005, but below are my thoughts on this leaderboard.
Who's on Techmeme?
Many people wrongly believe that the blogs that appear on Techmeme are hand picked by site creator Gabe Rivera. In fact, after an initial seeding of the index when the site launched in 2005, Rivera only touches the content on the site to fix problems that arise. Blogs are added to the Techmeme index, more or less, by being linked-to by other blogs that are already indexed by Techmeme. It's not a perfect system, but it's not nearly as closed as many critics allege.
That said, it is a black box. No one knows for sure how the stories are selected and ranked on Techmeme. That's both a strength and a weakness. No black box ranking system will ever serve all ranking needs in any industry.
Techmeme vs. Technorati
Michael Arrington said tonight that the new leaderboard means that blog search engine Technorati no longer has a leg to stand on, because the Technorati 100 was the company's last important differentiating feature.
I disagree. This Techmeme leaderboard cannot replace Technorati. Even if the Technorati 100, the list of the most linked-to blogs on the web, does suffer from spam as Michael Arrington asserts - the solution is simple. Just as Ask.com displays blogsearch results only from blogs that have a certain number of subscribers in the company's feed reader, Bloglines, so too Technorati can find a simple way to vet the quality of the links it's counting.
More importantly, Technorati offers a topical blog index that's useful outside of the limited subject matter covered by Techmeme and its off-shoots Memeorandum, WeSmirch and BallBug. Want to know who the most linked-to blogs about real estate are? About knitting? Technorati offers a valuable, if very imperfect, answer to questions like that. Just visit a URL like http://www.technorati.com/blogs/knitting
Techmeme and industry leadership
An appearance on Techmeme will drive many bloggers' traffic through the roof. For a big news blog, though, showing up on Techmeme isn't about traffic. Read/WriteWeb gets more traffic than Techmeme, for example, but not nearly as much as Digg. Digg is a traffic driver. Techmeme is about link-respect from blogging peers.
That's a fine thing to measure in 30 day increments, but it's also important to acknowledge that not all blogs are equal in Techmeme. It is a black box, but it certainly appears that some big blogs carry a whole lot more weight than others. If my personal blog links to some one else's blog post, that post will not be shot onto Techmeme. If TechCrunch, Engadget or Read/WriteWeb link to some one's blog post, the journey for that blog post to make it to Techmeme is going to be a whole lot shorter.
The threshold for some blogs to make it onto Techmeme is much lower than it is for most others. That means that this metric of headline leadership over 30 days may be a self-perpetuating matter. You were on Techmeme a lot because you're on Techmeme a lot. Arrington says the list will change frequently because of the 30 day intervals - but we'll see. The Technorati 100 only counts inbound links from the past 6 months, but when the top of the top changes on that list it's big, big news. That list doesn't change very much and I'll be interested to see how much the Techmeme leaderboard changes.
What about the rest of the world?
Other questions that should be asked include the following:
What does this mean for the rest of the world outside of the US? Techmeme is barely a global phenomenon; it crawls to near halt outside of the blogging hours of the United States. The Technorati 100, on the other hand, includes scores of blogs that aren't even written in English - but have massive readership.
A list based on reciprocal links isn't a complete list. Gender and other biases, different blogging subcultures and any number of other factors make a Techmeme-type leaderboard inevitably limited in its scope. I think Gabe Rivera acknowledges that. When I asked him just what he aimed to do with the leaderboard, he said:
"Well, it's designed primarily to identify Techmeme's most frequent sources, a much-requested feature. Techmeme focuses on the tech industry, so indeed, you won't be able to pit GigaOM vs. Perez Hilton using the Techmeme leaderboard. I betting that's OK with Techmeme readers."
I also asked him how the leaderboard could compete with Mahalo and he admitted that there was no stopping Mahalo, but that's another story.
That's just fine, there's not too much harm in the limits of the site's scope - though another standard of leadership that's dominated by white men in the US is not really what the world needs, in my opinion. We'll still aim to climb higher and higher on the Techmeme leaderboard - but there's plenty of room for other standards of measurement in leadership, in as much as that's even necessary.
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