First, some whining. Don’t get me wrong, I’m definitely not nagging about the big boys getting all the good stuff first. And I definitely have no beef with either TechCrunch, R/WW or Techmeme - I frequent all these sites daily. But, it’s just silly to me to read about a new online service that’s, well, not online yet.

This is a topic that’s been bugging me for quite some time now. I understand that startups want big tech blogs to like them, and they’re trying to give them heads up on new products, services and upgrades before anyone else. It’s fine. However, do they understand how much they’re losing this way? All the people who click to this link from the TechCrunch or R/WW article (and the number will probably be considerable) will be greeted with a dead page. And they’re likely to be annoyed, instead of interested. Is it a good tradeoff? It’s for the startup owners to decide, I guess, but I’d say: hell no.

Back on topic - Techmeme Leaderboards, Techmeme’s upcoming list of blogs who get indexed the most on Techmeme (if you’re not familiar with the site, read about it in our big memetracker review), is not a topic I can really intelligently comment about, because I can’t try the damn thing out yet. However, TechCrunch’s comparison of the Techmeme Leaderboard with Technorati’s top 100 - and the suggestion that Technorati will go down in flames because of it - is something that’s debatable based on my usage of Techmeme alone.

Technorati isn’t doing all that well, lately. But it measures (and bases its top lists on) a relatively simple metric - the number of inbound links towards a blog. Techmeme, on the other hand, has an algorithm that’s, well, Gabe Rivera’s private affair, and it’s obviously aimed at clustering sources of news on a topic, not measuring the popularity of blogs. Sites that write about topics that currently aren’t extra-hot will get indexed less by Techmeme. On the other hand, merely writing about everything everyone writes about all the time (on a semi-popular blog) will probably move you up in the Techmeme rankings. Also, Techmeme has a heavy bias towards internet/software/gadgetry topics, so top hardware sites rarely get mentioned there.

But, most importantly, if you want to go up in Technorati rankings, you’re pretty much depending on every other blogger out there to link to you, and Technorati itself up to some extent. If you want to go up in Techmeme rankings (I’ll say this with a pinch of salt, because, you know, I haven’t seen the Techmeme Leaderboard yet and I might be missing on something here), you’re depending on yourself and Techmeme. I like the first scenario better.

All this said, this is not a bad idea at all. It’ll be nice to have a Techmeme-based blog top list, simply because Techmeme indexes most of the sites that cover Web 2.0-ish topics, which are also my area of interest here on FranticIndustries. But will it replace Technorati (or, better put, the number of inbound links as a popularity metric for blogs)? I doubt it.