Top of the Techs: The Techmeme Leaderboard

Its not surprising that all the big bloggers and news sources are discussing the Techmeme Leaderboard, after all, it's all about them: the sources most frequently posted to techmeme. The obvious comparison for such a leaderboard is with Technorati's top 100 blogs, and those that have found their ranking improved are unsurprisingly enthusiastic (e.g., Scripting News
and TechCrunch), but for every winner there is also a loser who is likely to be less enthusiastic.

Lists of the top 100 lists are always interesting, whether it is books, music, or web sites, but they don't necessarily mean very much: only a fool really believes that the Harry Potter books are great works of literature, and the top selling records are by the best artists. This does not mean I don't subscribe to many of the blogs and news sources on Techmeme's Leaderboard, merely that these are by no means the only ones I subscribe to. There are many highly specialised blogs that are never likely to make it onto such a list, but are nonetheless of great interest to a certain proportion of individuals. Blogging is about enabling the opinions of many people to be heard rather than the few, the creation of a Top 100 focuses on the opinions of the few.

Scoble mentions a lack of bloggers on the list, and suggests that it may be another indicator that blogging is dieing. Personally I don't believe blogging is dieing, it is merely changing. Whilst snippets of news and information will be shared by the micro-blogging format of Twitter, and established bloggers will gather together within one brand (e.g., Read/WriteWeb), there will continue to be a core set of bloggers for whom the traditional blog is the best way of sharing their thoughts and information.

Whilst many people enjoy looking at top 100 lists (or top-whatever), it is important that we don't put too much store in them, and remember that there is a lot of sites beyond that top 100, and for that Technorati is much better than TechMeme.