The Last Podcast

Ed Bott uses last weekend’s ruckus over Apple ‘forcing’ Windows users to install Safari on their machines to launch into an interesting rant about the echochamber effect on Techmeme:

Techmeme is the Short Attention Span Theater of the blogosphere. It’s an echo chamber. It encourages reactive, uncritical thinking. The blogswarm gets outraged by whatever they see on Techmeme, they write down whatever pops into their heads (without checking any facts and in most cases without even following the links), and then moves on to the next topic. A “discussion” lasts 24 hours.

Techmeme is a template for a gazillion me-too bloggers who manage to write a dozen posts a day without ever expressing an original thought. That, depressingly, appears to be a successful business model, at least for now.

Ed, who according to the article has the amazing amount of 100 RSS feeds on his reading list (how can he handle that much news?), says he only looks at Techmeme once or twice a month - and then only to remind himself what a waste of time it is.

I’m the first to agree with Ed that there is little more annoying on Techmeme than the me-too blogs that only repeat a news story without any attempt at critical thinking or furthering the conversation.

However, me-too blogging isn’t much of a business model. If you are trying to built a business on Techmeme me-too posts, you will be sorely disappointed. Very few Techmeme readers will actually come to your blog from bylines on Techmeme and a me-too blog posts will only very infrequently become a ‘real headline’ (where about 100 times as many readers will follow the link to your blog).

At the end of the day, Techmeme is still the watering hole of the tech blog community - for better or worse. If enough people deem a story worth writing about, which is what Techmeme really reflects, then I consider it a story worth checking out (and who knows, maybe commenting about). The echo chamber effect comes with that, but most readers seem to be able to tune it out.

Also, me-too bloggers will never be really successful in the blogosphere. The success of every new blogger who broke into the Techmeme Leaderboard and had Techmeme headlines came from writing original stories or from at least offering a very distinct point of view.

In the end, it’s a self-regulating system where the me-too bloggers will always slowly fade back into the background because me-too blogging is not a business model.

(of course, part of the irony of writing this is that there is a good chance this post will become a byline on Techmeme under Ed’s post - so be it - I hope I at least added something to the conversation)