Techmeme.

Note: Here’s an interview with Gabe Rivera, founder of Techmeme at Search Engine Land, where I learned much of the information below.

When I started blogging in earnest six months ago, I bookmarked Techmeme and began regularly plowing through, checking out other technology blogs - mostly to get design ideas, but later, to identify writers that consistently provided solid content on a regular basis, read their stuff, and track what they were writing about. I still visit a number of sites I found in addition to Techmeme, daily.

So what does the site do? Basically, Techmeme displays links to articles or posts found on news websites and blogs. It identifies the stories (hence, the “meme” in the name) people are writing about (through links) and organizes them in little “cells” that document the conversation across sites. Beneath a popular story appear links to the other articles that link to it.

Despite the buzz words of links and ranking, Techmeme works differenly than a social site like Digg, where one user equals one vote. It basically culls through a list of blogs (numbering in the low thousands) to find and determine these important stories. It also eschews comments altogether.

Because of the internally held site list, I suppose the clearest analogy is an oligarchy of votes rather than the free-for-all democracy of digg and many other social news sites. That might seem inherently unfair, but it has appeal to anyone wondering if the “wisdom of crowds” is in practice more like “lowest common denominator.” All I’ll say is I find very few “Top Twenty Hot iPod Steve Jobs Underwear Babes” on Techmeme (but if that’s what you’re looking for, you now know where to go).

There are some additional benefits. Through this method, spam blogs never show up. This is because the Techmeme system notes both links to and from posts, and culled-through sources aren’t in the habit of linking to spam blog content. This may sound like an obvious side benefit, but it’s a key difference between Techmeme and search engines which rely on spiders that aren’t great at separating “real” content from spam, or the middle ground of questionable content set up just to get people to click on ads. In a sense, the sites that Techmeme tracks act as human filters, doing a job that is difficult for an algorithm.

Because of the way Techmeme finds links and popular articles, I imagine it would be difficult to “game” Techmeme (as some claim is occurring on digg). There’s an implication that if your blog doesn’t continue to be cited regularly (which surely would be the case if one were “gaming”) it would fall out of the Techmeme system.

One downside: Techmeme definitely fosters an echo-chamber, with few blogs adding much to the conversation (I’m as guilty of that as anyone), but in a way, if a subject is inspiring lots of bloggers to jump on it just for the sake of being included in the conversation, there must be something cool going on, right? But If a certain story is bugging me with its inexplicable popularity, the next day it’s usually gone. And once you get used to the way things work, you can observe stories gain buzz, rise in importance, and fade over time.

Another angle on TechMeme is that it generates a nice technology editorial page. In a sense, this is the closest to a Web 2.0 newspaper I’ve seen, with stories existing on many different sites. The Techmeme system is the editor. And because of the opinion nature of the blogs included, (also with the sister site memeorandum), it’s essentially an editorial page for Google News.

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