Now, everyone can see how Techmeme ranks tech blogs according to what they call presence - the percentage of headline space a source occupies over the 30-day period.

My thoughts on the thing - pre-launch - are below, but now, from Techmeme’s Gabe Rivera’s blog, you can see I wasn’t too far off the mark. This paragraph reveals a lot:

“Is it biased? I wish it were obvious, but there’s no such thing as an unbiased automated news site (or search engine for that matter). Automation doesn’t remove bias, it merely obscures it. The configurations that make Techmeme a tech news site embody some of that bias. Beyond that, headlines are also skewed by Techmeme’s emphasis of business news over areas like video game reviews, developer news, gadget arcana, and green tech. Finally, influencers that communicate mainly in links don’t figure prominently on Techmeme. Slashdot is widely read, yet absent from the top 100.“

Again, there’s nothing wrong with bias, as stated by Gabe in this paragraph. But, it shows that Techmeme Leaderboard should be viewed more as a place to find new or perhaps upcoming blogs - not as a definitive list of the top tech sites in general.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 1st, 2007 at 2:28 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.