TechMeme Archive

Earlier this week Google Blogsearch relaunched with an aggregator of sorts. Immediately several sites including ReadWriteWeb claimed it was a "Techmeme killer". The truth is that Google Blogsearch won’t kill or injure Techmeme and I’ve created the video embedded below to outline the main reason why.

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.

We initially reviewed blog directory Blogged earlier this year. It’s a human curated blog directory that provides a (somewhat bogus) score for each blog. Today Blogged is back with their launch of a news portal site. Blogged editors will pull breaking news and the most compelling stories from their content categories (technology, entertainment, sports, etc.) and then displays the stories on the frontpage.

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.

Yesterday I spent some time at the new NY Times building (which is absolutely beautiful) with Philippe Lourier. Philippe is the product manager of the Blogrunner product. He founded the product about five years ago and then sold it to the NY Times. Currently he is the only person on the Blogrunner team, but says that more people will be allocated soon. I was very much looking forward to this interview and discussion and I walked away pleased with the result.

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.

So much buzz about TechMeme since the Leaderboard launched 10 days ago. First bits of buzz were around egos, now it’s about traffic. Let me lay the smack down to all of you jabronies. TechMeme is about three things: finding who is talking about what, and adding your view to that discussion, and directly linking back to those you found.

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.

This week marked the launch of the newest egoboard, the Techmeme Leaderboard. I thought it might be fun to look at the movers and shakers in the first four days since launch. The chart is below. From what I can put together, the big winners so far are Silicon Alley Inisider and NewTeeVee and the big loser is CenterNetworks dropping nearly 20 places!

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 #2 – Ben Metcalfe examines how many of the Top 100 are actually blogs? 

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)

Technorati has launched a new feature on the site called "Topics." Topics pulls the best posts from the "best blogs" and lists them in a river-style format. Sean at Mashable calls it "useless". Personally I would rather they spend the time fixing the authority rankings rather than add new technology. Let’s make sure the foundation is strong before we add a new floor on the house.

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.