Oct

16

Wasting a good Techmeme

October 16, 2007 |

Jeremiah Owyang chastises bloggers for wasting Techmeme real estate (on the same issue, also see Mathew Ingram’s post here). Here is his list of the three strategies he sees blogger play on Techmeme:

1) When I look at the expanded view of Techmeme, all I see is a regurgitation of the same bloggers repeating the same titles, and same information I’ve already read from the top story. Why? attention, and the ability to build up a referencable database of posts increasing search engine juice and potential views for advertising.

2) Other bloggers play the “net” game, they round up all the thoughts and opinions of other bloggers and lay it out on a single post. Other than collecting the information (which Techmeme does by default) they add very little value or opinion.

3) Break news or add interesting opinion, analysis, or entertain. I’m not talking about you.

Here is the (slightly edited) comment I left him:

Indeed, there is too much repetition and not enough analysis on Techmeme these days - and some of it is outright spam. However, given time, these blogs will be filtered out of the system. If somebody consistently stops adding to the conversation, he/she will not get linked to anymore and should drop out of the index over time automatically.

Personally, I try not to blog about a story unless I think I have something new to add to the conversation.

But I am guilty as charged as well. When I just started out, I would leech on to any top story on Techmeme (basically following Jason Calacanis’ advice). Without doing that, it is tough to get onto Techmeme in the first place and if you are a new tech blogger not listed there, you don’t get much attention/links/readers.

And even today, I do the same thing as Louis describes (this is in reference to this comment here).

If “Big Blog A” writes about X 30 minutes after I do, it’s likely “Big Blog A” will get picked up on TechMeme and I won’t. Therefore, it’s tempting to edit my post and add a link saying “Also see: Big Blog A”. Then, I’d be in the discussion section.

Sometimes I know I had a story first, but nobody linked to me, so I will still tag on to the Techmeme headline.

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