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Update: Scott for Blogcosm clarifies some misunderstandings :
Our approach to analyzing blogs is different than anything we’ve seen. (There’s no shortage of interesting software opportunities; I’ve never been one to create “me too” products or sites.) Because we tackle fewer blogs, we can afford to provide more information about each.
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Marshal Kirkpatrick reports on Bogcosm on Read/Write Web today:
The site is ugly and bare bones today. The potential, though, is significant. As you can imagine, Lawton watches computer scientist Gabe River’s blog tracking service Techmeme closely as well. “Techmeme is just a pale shadow of what it could be,” he told me. “For Gabe’s sake I hope it’s him that builds what Techmeme could be. If it’s not him, it could be us.”
The site is ugly indeed, and right now, it seems Blogcosm is mostly pulling in data and not really exposing much of it to the audience yet. Their homepage states so much: “We’re building a reference site about blogging and the blogosphere, one day at a time. There’s not much to see here at the moment, but that will change a little bit (nearly) every day.”
Bogcosm also features a directory of people behind the Top 100 blogs on Technorati, though I am not sure why exactly.
While I like the idea of challenging Techmeme, they have their work cut out for them. Everybody else in the meme space right now isn’t up to snuff compared to Techmeme.
Tailrank is mostly useful for looking at yesterday’s news because that’s about how long it takes for a story to show up there. Megite looks nice, but is also slower and doesn’t have the mindshare of Techmeme among tech bloggers.
I have two memetrackers I use exclusively: Techmeme and Feeddemon’s Popular Topics. The Popular Topics function in Feeddemon mimics Techmeme, but only takes the feeds I am subscribed to into account and presents me with my own, personal Techmeme.
Er, Blogcosm isn’t a meme tracker or news aggregator. Ignoring Marshall’s title, just look at my quote. Gabe has built a great site, and I wish him well. Blogcosm tracks blogs not posts.
I think it’s very interesting to learn more about the people behind a blog, their background, other blogs, etc. Plus lots of stats about the blog, comparisons across different sources of “top” rankings etc. If you don’t, I guess you’re not part of our target audience.
Scott - thanks for clarifying that. I thought the idea of focusing on people inside a memetracker was a bit off.
But now that I see that’s the focus of what you do, I think it’s a great idea.