MG then went all Columbo on us by explaining the stats on the Microsoft official twitter account.  He notes that only 1,000 people were following the account but as of this morning it’s up to nearly 5,000! MG also found out who is behind the account. He notes, “The account is being run by its corporate communications team, consisting of four people.”

The big news here is that since the post, Microsoft’s 4-person twitter communications team has added a third tweet. That’s right…a company with two tweets makes big headlines (the story got a lead from Techmeme ) so I figured I’d watch the account as best I could and I setup a SMS alert when content is added. So I present now, the third tweet message from Microsoft Corporation:

USA Today on Bing v Google “For a search that sings you may want to Bing it” ^JR

CenterNetworks will continue to monitor the account and will report back of any further important developments.

Update: Microsoft has since added tweets 4 and 5 to their account. We can confirm they are now closing in on Oprah’s count.

It’s amazing the vibe that you get for Twitter as soon as you exit the plane in San Francisco. One homeless guy outside the BART station didn’t ask me for change…he asked me to retweet his tweet! I am looking forward to shooting more videos tomorrow with others as I attempt to learn what being on the default list would mean to them.

DandyID

Service verification allows you to assure people that who you say you are is who you are on a specific service. DandyID is using oAuth along with other verification services including the Flickr Authentication API and Facebook Connect for the verification. What this means is that after you signup for a DandyID account, you can select to verify a variety of services they have listed.

The Pro Accounts service is available for $4.99 and includes the following services:

• Personal Stats: Track how people are connecting with your complete identity across the web
• Social Analytics: Learn where your contacts exist online and which social networks are most important to them
• Contact Updates: Get notified via RSS whenever one of your contacts adds a new service to DandyID
• Pro Mail: Send 5 messages per month to members who are not on your contacts list

Update: Ken Stewart has posted a good review of DandyId.

From the release, “The partnership announced today will make it easy for any organization using the Brightcove platform to program and syndicate advertising-supported video content across the sevenload network. This integration will also enhance the online video experiences for sevenload users by making top-rated programming from Brightcove customers available for viewing and sharing with the wider sevenload community.”

German sports site SPOX is the first to distribute their content to Sevenload via this new partnership and Brightcove says more sites will be announced soon.

We’ve seen top tech bloggers sending in tips for their own stories. And many others have submitted tips here and there. But from what I can tell, it looks like one person has risen above the others in terms of a "tip to lead" (known hereunto as the TTL) ratio.

Atul Arora from Freemont, California is able to get more tips to turn into leads than any of the other tippers. Check out the screenshot below to see his tipping power – this shot comes from midday yesterday and shows the top 2 stories were both tipped via his account. Atul is a master networker with over 500+ contacts on LinkedIn. Check out Atul’s Friendfeed account with links to all of his social services. I have contacted Atul and hope to conduct a full interview with him soon. I’d like to learn more about how he determines which sites to tip and which stories to tip. I guess to some extent he is the MrBabyMan of Techmeme.

I wonder how far off we are from a Techmeme Tipper Leaderboard. The leaderboard would display the top 100 tippers, their "TTL" ratio, and which sites they have tipped. We could also see in the future a Techmeme Top Sites Tipped Leaderboard which would display the top sites that have received leads via a tip.

Related: The Semi-Human Techmeme: A Month Later

Update: Gabe replied in the comments including, "I can share some stats: to date 196 headlines hitting Techmeme were tipped prior to appearing, and 89 different people have tipped. There are dominant tippers, but the tail, naturally, is long."

The change I’ve noticed the most is that more stories are receiving "lead" status with no visible links. I am guessing this is where the editor plays the biggest role. She can make stories live immediately versus waiting for the algorithm to pick them up and do it’s magic of link association. Oh yea, bitchmemes (staged or real) are apparently an excellent way to boost a blog’s standings on the leaderboard.

Many seemed to believe that Michael Arrington, holder of the top slot (then and now), was nervous that the leaderboard would change based on a post he authored after the news was made public. Marshall Kirkpatrick discussed the Techmeme advertising model and the hiring of a woman as the first editor. Susan Mernit also looks at the revenue model and provides some Techmeme revenue estimates for 2008.

Several new sites are listed on the current leaderboard but weren’t on the list as of December 5th. They are: InternetNews, jkOnTheRun, TUAW, TheOpenRoad, InsideFacebook, Loic LeMeur Blog, Agence France Presse, Google Mobile Blog, Hardware 2.0, DSLReports, PE Hub Blog, Zero Day, Lifehacker, Gawker (probably took over for Valleywag), Fast Company, Inquirer, Apple, TmoNews, Tech Daily Dose, The Bivings Report, Scobleizer, Telegraph, Hitwise Intelligence, Louis Gray, and The Digital Home.

For reference here’s the Techmeme leaderboard as of December 5, 2008 and January 4, 2009:

There are a variety of good posts on the Google Blogsearch/Techmeme killer topic including: Rob Diana, Steven Hodson, Duncan Riley, Josh Catone and Svetlana Gladkova. Sean Percival had a bit of fun with the topic noting that the only reason Techmeme will be killed is because Techcrunch didn’t make their lead payments on time.

Techmeme would be a much stronger asset to the community if there were topic pages (similar to Blogrunner) and the current hierarchy was removed. There would be a higher level of discovery and a nice dose of leveling would take place. I have been researching Techmeme for over six months and will eventually have a lengthy video about the overall news-aggregator topic and additional thoughts for improvement.

Here is how Blogged compares itself to the other news sites like Google News and Yahoo News along with the "meme trackers" like TechMeme:

Google News and Yahoo News feature top stories from traditional news sources using a combination of technology and human editors. Memetrackers such as Techmeme and Blogrunner use algorithms to identify and present related stories as told by cliques of bloggers related to a particular industry. User-generated news communities such as Mixx, Digg, and Reddit showcase popular stories daily from across the Web as saved and voted on by individuals. Blogged.com is the only community that features the top qualified stories, representing all popular topics, organized by categories from around the blogosphere, combined with a full informational directory that includes rankings, reviews and recommended reading for each blog.

Today’s launch by Blogged seems very similar to what Blogrunner offers except that it’s human curated versus machine-driven. From a gathering the news standpoint, it’s basically like Mahalo. Both Mahalo and Blogrunner create tag pages, Mahalo uses their staff and volunteers to find links, Blogrunner uses computers to find the links. Blogged seems to be more in the Mahalo style but without the tag pages.

I don’t know how large the Blogged team is, but my only question is whether they be able to stay on top of all of the breaking news across so many categories and be able to bubble up the news in (near) real-time? If so, awesome. Also, I hope they will provide diversity in the blogs that they pimp.

They should add a social layer on top of the news – since they know a lot about each blog, there’s a wealth of information they could layer on top of the news and create a community effect on top of the news.

Everyone consumes news in different ways and the one-page category portal-style overveiew should work well for a mainstream audience.

I am calling Blogrunner a "topic discovery engine". When it relaunched late last year, most of the reviews noted that it was basically a widget that lives on the tech section of the NY Times site. It’s a lot more than that now. A LOT MORE. There are Blogrunner widgets on nearly every page on the NY Times site. Those widgets drive traffic both to the source content and to Blogrunner topic pages.

It’s a content aggregator that aggregates over 10,000 sources in a variety of categories including tech, politics, money, media, law, music, etc. Every day, over 2,000 new topic pages are created on Blogrunner. There are two technologies at work – one is a link checker and the other is a content similarities engine. Blogrunner doesn’t use RSS to get the content and that leads to more meta-data availability on Blogrunner. Here are a few example topic pages:

• Google
• Tim Russert Passes Away
• Gun Control

Promoted correctly, Blogrunner could really injure Mahalo. When Tim Russert passed away, CEO Jason Calacanis had to send his "news team" and his Twitter-followers on a frantic scraping search for links and then built some content to create a page. Philippe said his topic page was live within 5 minutes and continues to be "live" unlike Mahalo. Most pages on Mahalo become stale very quickly unless it’s a topic that their team deems necessary to keep updating. Furthermore, they plan to, in the near future, open Blogrunner to the editors and producers at the NY Times to add human-curated links and content.

Many have compared Blogrunner to TechMeme on the tech side. Philippe explained that Blogrunner is completely automated and every blog has the same weight. This is very different than TechMeme which has blog weights and other factors that play into who gets the lead and who is #1 on the leaderboard. Philippe explained that the weight is actually done per post and the scoring system is similar to the Google PageRank system. TechMeme gives you a better single page news "what’s hot" view while Blogrunner offers more topic pages that can be "watched".

Philippe was very open to my suggestions on how to make the product better and start to show more diversity and allow readers more discovery. What I’d love to see are Blogrunner widgets. Allow me to stick the latest topics and headlines from the Blogrunner system into CN. There should also be RSS feeds for every topic.

To be honest, it pisses me off that the NY Times isn’t doing more with this product. Blogrunner could be a huge offering for the NYT and yet it just sits there. It’s an absolute shame. Not only would the NY Times see more revenue from promoting Blogrunner, but blogs would see more traffic from the tool as well. We see this lax attitude with many startups acquired by large corporations — see Flickr, Delicious and Jaiku for recent examples.

If you haven’t checked out Blogrunner recently, I’d suggest you take another look.

Dave Winer started this latest discussion about "driven traffic" yesterday with a piece that seems to be an attack on Arrington more than TechMeme (which he earlier called a cesspool). Dave is right, a link from TechCrunch drives very little traffic – however, there is an ABSOLUTE difference between a link to another blog and to a service. When a service is linked to from TC, the traffic is much higher (not sure exactly but it is higher, though most report not as high as it once was). Why are the blogger referrals low? Simple, two reasons: a. many reading arrington believe his view is the only one that counts and b. the visitor wants to get to the service, not another’s view of the service. In addition, Dave might not have realized that the story was removed in the early afternoon.

Next up was Bobbie Johnson from the Guardian who suggests we overestimate TechMeme’s influence using pure direct hits to the Guardian Web site as his basis. He notes that he is ranked #57 on the Leaderboard (CN is currently #36). Well, certainly you won’t see a ton of traffic – look at what either 57 or 36 get you? For easy math, let’s use Techdirt which currently has a 1% rating – this means for the last 30 days, TD had 1% of all of the headlines, and Guardian had half of that. How can he expect TM to drive a ton of traffic when barely any of his stories make it to the top? And when a story does reach the top, we don’t know how long it stays there, does it get pushed out by a higher ranking site (this happens a lot it seems), do other more important stories push it out as well? Even Arrington, the TechMeme golden key holder only holds 5% of all of the lead stories over the past 30 days.

Here is why I love TechMeme. It let’s me see who is talking about what and then I can decide to add my own voice into the mix. And one very important part that Bobbie and so many others forget – how many other sites are linking to you BECAUSE of TechMeme? I find that when I hit the lead on a story, I generate additional inbounds. Many of the bigger bloggers and other news sites use TechMeme sources for their articles. Sometimes I get on Digg because someone found my article through TechMeme.

If I think of highschool math it’s: a > b, b > c, therefore a > c. Not a perfect analogy but you get the point whereby A = your site, B = techmeme and C = all the new sites that linked to you because of TM.

Let me just say that one additional visitor from a source is excellent in my eyes. An old cartoon had a man with a voice bubble that said, "boy i wish i could lose 10lbs" – the 1 pound weight sitting next to the weight machines thought "if he only lost me, he would get there" – everyone wants 50k traffic from digg/slashdot – take every single visitor you get and cherish it.

Mr. Ingram brings the thunder with his commentary (which I agree with). He notes, "I’ve had Digg-storms and Reddit pile-ons and the traffic that they bring is usually fleeting. I’ll take a few thousand Techmeme readers over that any day." TechMeme traffic converts better in my opinion than Digg/Reddit.

Are there things that bug me about TechMeme? Sure, the biggest one being the "juice" ratings that Gabe gives each site. This is why the Top 5 will remain the Top 5 for the coming year (unless the juice changes). No way anyone will be able to kick off Techcrunch or Engadget. Everyone should have an equal opportunity and unfortunately they don’t.

And lastly, fellas and ladies, if you don’t like TechMeme for whatever reason, then block the service and be done with it.

But don’t come crying to me when you don’t make it on to the other top sites (blogs, newspapers, etc.) that I have mentioned above. And that’s the bottom line… because CN says so. Now let’s all get back to writing real content about real stories.

So one must wonder, how did SAI and NTV move up? SAI is easy: create fake content (see stories on Google at $2k/share and TC selling for $100M) that big bloggers believe is real and you get links that move you up. Then write additional content to lure the big bloggers in for even more links. NTV is part of a "blog network" which can link to itself creating juice on both sides. TechMeme founder Gabe Rivera notes that these blog networks are considered individual properties so when GigaOm links to NTV, it "could" push it even futher in the TechMeme presence rankings.

Erick over at TechCrunch had a rant post today discussing why TC doesn’t get much Digg love anymore. Unfortunately the rant has been edited so I can’t note it here, but he did say that they love the TechMeme leaderboard. And why wouldn’t he love it? They are ranked #1 and got the exclusive. :)

It’s important to remember that there is a "ranking factor" that goes into what your mathematical possibility is for getting a lead spot on TechMeme. TechCrunch occupies the best ranking factor currently.

I wouldn’t go as far as Dave Winer has in saying that it’s a cesspool. He notes, "I’m thinking of this idiotic post (calacanis 3.0) by an idiot (calacanis) who’s known for saying idiotic things just to get attention." Some people would say that any of these ranking systems (digg, reddit, techmeme, etc.) lose their ability to show you the best content once people begin to game them.

So many bloggers are worried about what people think that they forget their audience and write stories only to get a push on some leader list. Do the things that got you an audience and your blog will grow. Do you think that because Ars Technica is #1 on most front page diggs, that they are getting more of an audience? No.

Thought for today… when baseball begins a new season, all teams start at 0 wins, 0 losses, the previous season doesn’t carry over. Even if the Yankees have 100 wins and the Red Sox 20 in the previous season, both teams start at the same position. How come this doesn’t happen in blogging?

Here is the leaderboard:

Update: Dave at Scripting News has published the entire current Top 100 – CN made #39! Looking at the list also brings back the debate of what is a blog.

TechCrunch has the exclusive on a new feature launching today from TechMeme called "The Leaderboard". Mike notes, "The list will be created based on the blogs that created the most headlines on Techmeme over the previous thirty days (so it will change frequently)." You can also check out our 5 suggestions for improving TechMeme.

There is some discussion from Mike and others that this will affect Technorati but I am not so sure I agree with that. As Darren Rowse points out on the TC comments, "it is a great way of measuring things in a niche – however as it only looks at blogs writing on technology it misses 99% of the blogosphere."

Only headlines will be counted in the "Presence" scoring – “the percentage of headline space a source occupies over the 30-day period.”

Mike also notes, "I think this is a much better way of ranking the very top blogs than the Technorati approach. Technorati has deep flaws, for reasons stated above. Techmeme, by contrast, has zero spam and tends to mirror what the tech blogosphere is writing about perfectly." Except that at a basic level, Technorati is not biased as TechMeme is.

Yes, TechMeme is a great tool, I check it out several times each day and it is absolutely a great way to see what the tech blogs are writing about. Many times, I use it as a research tool for the articles I write. 

What does this leaderboard actually do? Remember that TechMeme is not unbiased. It pushes the sites that Gabe believes are the biggest or most influential by default (whether by human or by algorithm). So for example, let’s say XYZ site breaks a story and 5 others write about it including 2 of the "TM Faves" – those Faves have a much better chance of pushing out XYZ site as the headline and thereby capturing that bit of the "Presence" score. In fact, if you want to talk about gaming, any of the TM Faves only has to write a story about any topic already on TechMeme to obtain a great chance at another headline presence score addition.

Marhsall Kirkpatrick has a more objective review than Mike’s which includes, "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."

He is right but he is missing the point. If discussion doesn’t count, then his personal blog won’t get the points once RWW posts about the same thing. It’s all about float fellas and ladies and if anyone thinks this list will change every 30-days, they are surely mistaken. 

(and fyi, I have no idea if CN is included in the 100 or not)

From the T’rati blog: We considered a number of factors to get the seed list of blogs including Technorati Authority, frequency of posting, use of relevant tags, links to related subject matter and general topicality. With Topics, we help you discover what bloggers are writing about in Entertainment, Technology, Politics, Sports, Business, and Life.

Of course what they really mean is "… we send you what bloggers we want to link to are writing about…". This is why I like TechMeme for my tech news. I can see at a glance which stories are hot, check a variety of opinions from the a-list, the wanna be a-list and all of the others. With Topics all I see is what they feed to me.

What would make Topics stronger are feeds and listings. Allow me to grab a feed from a category, now that might be hot. And then show in the individual blog whether they are part of a topic and how to suggest a feed addition.

Suggestion #1 – Search

Why is there no search? I should be able to plug in a term (i.e. Blockbuster) and see the stories that have hit TechMeme over a given time period. There is an "archive" option but who can remember which time (including seconds!) to put in. Stories on TechMeme move so much during a 15-minute period that it makes it nearly impossible to get it just right.

Suggestion #2 – No Uppercase

This seems to apply mainly to the good people at Cnet who believe that yelling the titles of their stories at us is best. But there are many offenders to the uppercase titles. Let's have TechMeme fix this with a simple CSS code addition to the titles section.

Suggestion #3 – Better Font Usage

See my illustration below. TechMeme currently uses Arial as the text font. My suggestion is to change it to Tahoma and add a pinch of line spacing to make it easier to read and easier on the eyes. Arial is so like yesterday!

Suggestion #4 – Facebook App

Who doesn't have a Facebook App these days! Scoble would love it!

Suggestion #5 – Create a linkback option

Similar to Technorati, TechMeme could create an awesome linkback search option. I put in a URL, and it finds who else has linked to that story in the "TechMeme format".