IP Democracy: Yet Another Reason to Think Your Blog Sucks

Techmeme is a blogging phenomenon that is the constantly changing bible of what's important in the tech blogosphere and business press. Thousands of bloggers, me included, and journalists check this invaluable aggregator multiple times per day (or as Mathew Ingram confesses, even hourly).

Even more impressive is the fact that Techmeme is the brainchild of a single guy, Gabe Rivera, who built up his empire of aggregators (including the equally addictive and totally time-wasting gossip site Wesmirch) with no staff and no start-up capital. Techmeme is purportedly now worth $4 to $6 million to Gabe if he were in the mood to sell.

Gabe is kicking up the value of his site even further with a new service called the Leaderboard, which will list the top 100 blogs and sites based not on inbound links, a la Technorati's top 100, but on Techmeme's own secret sauce, which includes objective algorithms along with other, unspecified criteria.

That's great for Techmeme and the lucky Leaderboard "blogs" (not all are blogs -- 33% are top news sources such as The New York Times) but an ego blow for everybody else who doesn't make it onto the Leaderboard. In fact, as some observers have noted, the Leaderboard might just solidify and (ultimately calcify) the blogosphere's "echo chamber" by proclaiming only 100 sources as the most important.

Granted, the 100 sites will theoretically fluctuate every 30 days based on how often the sites' headlines land on Techmeme. But, as Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb (a Leaderboard and Technorati 100 site already) notes, the Leaderboard may just end up becoming a self-perpetuating thing:

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.

I'm hoping that the Leaderboard doesn't come to dominate Techmeme's value. We already know that TechCrunch and Gigaom and Engadget and ReadWriteWeb and Robert Scolbe exist and are important. And frankly, as great as those sites and bloggers are, they're wrong, or boring or self-referential some times, as any source can be.

The real value of Techmeme is its ability to pull from across the vast (English-speaking) Internet and put into tight capsules a diversity of opinion, news and analysis in a convenient one-stop-shop location. The Leaderboard, although truly an enhancement to Techmeme as well as a PR boon for the selected sites, runs counter to that great, big tent approach of Techmeme.

On the other hand, it's nice to have an alternative way of gauging a site's "importance" aside from Technorati or the badly messed-up Alexa. All this is merely pre-Leaderboard launch speculation, however. Let's see what happens after it launches tomorrow and, even more importantly, after it updates thirty days later.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on October 1, 2007 12:45 PM to IP Democracy