MediaVidea

Techmeme’s leaderboard: A-listers, rejoice!

Techmeme has introduced something called the Leaderboard, which will list 100 sources that had the most number of headlines appearing on the Techmeme homepage for the past month.

This new leaderboard is positioned squarely against Technorati’s Top 100 blog list, which has long been an indicator of blogging influence, and includes blogs who have attracted 3700 links during the past 6 months.

There are some who say that ranking bloggers on the basis of links is not ok.
Links can be bought, managed, whatever…

There there are people who will point out that many top bloggers enjoy the first-mover advantage and rankings like Technorati Top 100 and now Techmeme’s Leaderboard don’t reflect true and original opinion of the blogosphere.

Come to think of it: When Gabe Reviera, who founded Techmeme, came up with his indexes for his chain of selective topic aggregators, he must surely would have taken into account the Technorati Top 100 list (advantage no 1 for existing bloggers) and his own preferences (advantage no. 2 for silicon valley types and other sources).

Aggregators are never perfect.
This ‘A-lister upon A-lister’ arrangement leaves little scope for new voices and opinions to break in.

Chances are if a blogger wrote about the problems the iPhone had wouldn’t have made a blip on Techmeme’s homepage unless that blogger happens to be from Giozmodo, Engadget, Crunchgear and other and I don’t mean these aren’t fine blogs.

This A-list Economy forces writers, including this poor hack to take something a big-time blogger has written and then add to it, the implications being that your opinion is worth nothing for Techmeme and its type unless you toe somebody’s line.

That’s the A-listers’ tax most bloggers have to pay in order to be noticed.

There is always a gatekeeper and the gatekeeper has different shades for different people.

People will contend that only ‘original’ A-listers have something valuable to say and then maybe small bloggers like yours ruefully will decide not to write so much and not to suck up to anyone anymore.

Aggregators be damned.



Related Reading:

Rules of the Superstar Economy
Downsides of the A-list pheneomenon: Link Bait is easy
A-Listers: Navel Gazing dies hard

Labels: news 2.0, news aggregators, techmeme

posted by Pramit Singh @ 3:06 PM