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Gaming Techmeme Isn’t News

Fred the VC argues that the Techmeme Leaderboard is the reason that very few individuals are in the TM Top 100 these days:

I think it’s pretty simple. Everyone knows that you can write to techmeme if you want to be part of the conversation. Can’t think of what to write about? Go to techmeme, grab one of the memes, write a post that links to it, and your post will get picked up on it. Dave Winer predicted this would happen four days after the leaderboard launched.

That is nothing new. That’s what bloggers have done since TechMeme came about. But it has little to do with why the Top 100 on TechMeme is driven by big blogs and the MSM.

The reason why there are so many group and mainstream blogs on Techmeme is simply due to the fact that most news still breaks on what Dave Winer calls “pubs”: TechCrunch, Valleywag, Ars etc. Blogs with editors that aren’t very different from mainstream publications. Very few bloggers get to break news because very few bloggers have enough readers to make it worthwhile (Scoble might be the exception).

That’s why we link to the site that breaks the news. However, it also means that those of us on TechMeme who don’t break the news and don’t (yet) have enough mindshare are forever relegated to the second league and don’t register on the Leaderboard because everybody tags on to the headline and only few bloggers ever link or even read the conversation that follows it.

I’m not a fan of TechMeme. Often Mash will break news hours or days before other sites, but the same top five tend to get the headlines.

See today, where half of Techmeme is dominated by Kindle news, because a few blogs are getting kickbacks from Amazon for their good and copious reviews.

Unfortunately, TechMeme is the “newswire” that the tech blogosphere functions on.

Rizzn – fully agree (though I like TechMeme because as of now, it’s the best way to see where the action is).

Over the last few weeks, though, I have become a huge fan of the Popular Topics feature in FeedDemon. I looks at the blogs you read and creates a personalized meme tracker for you. And because you don’t depend on Google Reader updating the feeds for you, you usually get the news faster this way, too.

BTW – if it’s any consolation, I think Mashable has become a better source these days than TechCrunch…