Microsoft-Yahoo Story DOMINATES Techmeme

February 1, 2008

Like a lot of bloggers, I follow Techmeme to get the buzz in the blogopshere. Today, the story about Microsoft bidding to buy Yahoo is completely DOMINATING Techmeme. I think every blogger, and probably their grandmothers, are talking about this story.

To illustrate, look at this compiled screenshot of Techmeme as it is right now. The area in highlight is completely dedicated to blog coverage of this story.

techmemeI don’t believe I have seen a story take this much real estate on Techmeme since perhaps the Facebook Beacon fiasco.

A Momentary Venting By Dave

You know, it would be nice if Techmeme got its stories from more than just Technorati. Well, they probably do. But, PCMech.com is BY FAR my largest blog site and I would venture to say that it is more popular than most of the blogs that show up on Techmeme. However, Technorati, being the absolutely pathetic service that it is, can’t seem to manage to index PCMech properly.

Every time it has indexed PCMech, it is because I have contacted their support department and bitched. They then send the spiders to PCMech and they never return.

As a result (I’m guessing), PCMech never appears on Techmeme even though we are independelty covering a huge selection of the stories that make it onto Techmeme.

WebbyOnline, on the other hand, is my smallest blog. It, though, is beign indexed properly by Technorati and, therefore, appears on Techmeme.

Obligatory Linking

Now, just to illustrate my theory above, I am going to link to a few of the blog stories now on Techmeme and see if WebbyOnline appears on Techmeme. In the past, WebbyOnline has appeared on Techmeme for less popular stories even though this blog gets only a fraction of PCMech’s traffic. But, because Technorati indexes this site properly, this site gets onto Techmeme while PCMech doesn’t.

WTF.

Technorati’s spiders are – sorry – total shit. No other way to put it.

Here’s those links:

UPDATE – That Didn’t Take Long!

Here is an image of WebbyOnline – showing up on Techmeme. Meanwhile, I have a front-page story on PCMech about this and it’s nowhere to be found.

image

Damn you Technorati!

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  • Techmeme isn't like Technorati; its goal is to highlight, not to index. I'm not sure how its algorithm chooses linkers, and so can't guess why PCMech.com is not among the anointed.

    But today's news shows how Techmeme is less and less about surfacing news, and more about providing a linking service for commercial weblogs. All those MS/Yahoo entries with interchangeable headlines, and it's a crapshoot about which articles might have original insight. Memeorandum has the same phenomenon this week, with the US presidential campaign as soap opera.

    We need ways to reveal *information* from blogosphere commentary, not just highlight writers. I wish I knew how to achieve this goal.... :(
  • David
    John,

    I'm well aware that Techmeme isn't like Technorati, but it is very clear to me that Technorati plays a major role in how Techmeme discovers news to surface. PCMech.com is much, much more popular than WebbyOnline.com. The ONLY difference is that PCMech.com is currently not being properly indexed by Technorati while Webby is. And Webby is the site which ends up on Techmeme.

    And, yes, it is clear that Techmeme has a definite preference for larger, commercial blogs. I think the solution might be human-edited networks such as www.techdispenser.com.
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