Techmeme Leaderboard launches

Where have all the blogs gone?

The technology news "buzz tracker", Techmeme, has launched a new feature: the Leaderboard. A top 100 list of news sources -- blogs and "mainstream" media -- based on the percentage of headline space each one has occupied on Techmeme over the last thirty days (updated "every 20 mins").

Reaction in the blogosphere has been largely positive (especially amongst the bloggers who are featured!), although as Ben Metcalfe notes, only 33% "presence" of the sites who've made the Leaderboard are in fact blogs -- and as Richard MacManus points out, even fewer are blogs in the traditional one voice sense.

A quick look at the top 20, and we see blogs that are run as businesses, such as TechCrunch and Read/WriteWeb, along with AOL-owned Engadget, as well as mainstream media: New York Times, CNET, and the BBC, for example. This has led to a few to suggest that it signals the death of traditional, non-professional single author blogs.

I disagree, and actually think the Leaderboard highlights something that has been well known for quite sometime, but which is often talked down by bloggers. Lots of blog-fodder comes from mainstream media. It's very often that the most value, as well as the most noise comes from bloggers writing comment and analysis on stories that first appear in mainstream publications. This isn't a bad thing as blogs have the time, space, and editorial freedom to go into depth or take an apposing view which doesn't fit a mainstream agenda (think: long tail). At the same time, mainstream media still very often gets access to sources out of reach to many bloggers. Sad but true.

Since Techmeme's algorithm promotes stories in part on how many other blogs with "authority" link to them, it's really not surprising to see sites like the BBC or Apple's PR page, featured in the top 100 or even top 10. And joined with them, high up in the rankings, are blogs that have the resources (money) and expertise to break stories and/or write original content. Therefore, don't be surprised to see the blog networks (TechCrunch, ZDNet, Read/WriteWeb and GigaOm) do well.