In what must be the softest headlining story of the month, Mike Arrington’s story of how Digg users are having a look at a Digg clone called Mixx has made it to the top of Techmeme.
I have nothing to say about this story around Digg / Mixx, except that as a community grows in size, the number of assholes who populate it will, of course grow in number as well; what was tight knit and collegial gives way to anonymous ass-hat-ery, and that’s just the nature of the web.
Now, this isn’t really saying anything against the Techmeme algorithm, and why it should choose *this* story to headline itself, and not say, the seemingly more “important” story by the San Francisco Chronicle detailing how iTunes is launching the careers of some would-be-unlikely musicians.
Nor, for example, is about Mike Arrington wanting to write this piece.
Its about how at the beginning of the day, there were, maybe two bloggers who had wrote about it, like new media law dude Rob Hyndman and Bloggers Blog.
Now, at the end of the day, we have quadrupled that number.
Why? Well, if there was something intrinsically interesting or newsworthy about Mike’s piece I might say “its because its intrinsically interesting or newsworthy”. But because it really *isn’t*, I am led to believe the *only* a big reason they’re writing about it is because it *is* the headlining news story.
That is, they want to comment on the most “newsiest” story of the day, or there’s a desire (subconscious or no), to have your blog attached to the headlining story.
[I now speak from personal experience on both feelings which can be oddly profound at times]
Irrespective of the actual reason, I think it shows in a funny way, how powerful Techmeme is. Sure, we all read it, and yes, this is a weekend, but depending on what the headlining story is, it can really influence what bloggers write about.
I mean, let’s move this story down to the bottom and let’s see how many of them — “us”, really — write about this non-event. I would probably say “not a lot” and that’s being charitable.
As an aside, and I don’t know if there’s any way to prove this, but this also proves to be an interesting case example of how powerful Techmeme is relative to other aggregators. This fairly soft story is *also* headlining Megite, for example, *and* the Tech section of Blogrunner. Not having followed on the other aggregators, I do wonder if what happened was this story being fairly innocuous, hitting the Top of Techmeme, having other bloggers link to it, and then propelling the story to the top of other news aggregators.
Bottom line? Techmeme is our beloved aggregator, but for tech bloggers anyway, I think perhaps, that it has an inordinate amount of power. Or, rather, if its merely natural (as the most beloved of tech aggregators), then perhaps I never really appreciated how much power it had over us to begin with.
November 24th, 2007 at 9:12 pm | Permalink
“I am led to believe the *only* reason they’re writing about it is because it *is* the headlining news story.”
Er, if you say so.
November 24th, 2007 at 9:56 pm | Permalink
Meh — you’re right. That does sound a little too absolutist.
November 25th, 2007 at 1:15 am | Permalink
Tony it’s a CONSPIRACY! Interestingly I chose in this case not to include a link to TechCrunch’s story about this but I still appeared in discussion.
Fred Wilson also noted that blogs are sometimes “writing to TechMeme” but I’m still pondering whether this is good or bad. It focuses the “conversation” but that is often a good thing, and unlike commenting blog posts are a good way to have a conversation about a topic.
Thus, thanks to TechMeme you can “discuss” a topic across many blogs. This is boring in the silly case of MMIXX v DIGG, but great when the topic is important.
November 25th, 2007 at 2:15 am | Permalink
While I mostly agree with what you’re saying here, I would also say that both the existence of the story and the story getting to the top of Techmeme has to do with the holiday weekend as well. I’m with you 100% that the iTunes story was MUCH more interesting, but in a week devoid of that many big headlines, one about an exodus from Digg is more likely to attract readers.
You’ll notice I kept my hat out of the ring on this one - simply because I didn’t find anything that noteworthy about the story that I hadn’t said a couple months ago when I wrote about Mixx as a viable alternative to not just Digg but the other social news sites that it draws features from as well.
November 25th, 2007 at 3:30 am | Permalink
In part agree with MG Siegler, holiday weekend means different traffic trends, but I’m gonig to defend the story: Michael is suggesting that Mixx might be the new Digg, that’s fighting words that is bound to gain attention. Apple making stars is old news that goes back years: they made big stars out of Australian band Wolfmother a couple of years back..this is just another rehashed story that is old.
November 25th, 2007 at 4:16 am | Permalink
And just to follow up on what Duncan said, I’m not suggesting that Mike Arrington shouldn’t be writing about that - he should write about whatever he wants, all of us should. Too much of the blogosphere it seems to me recently has turned into people questioning others motives for stories they write - does Techmeme have an influence? Sure, but so do a lot of other things. If there was no influence everyone’s thoughts would be all over the place and the lack of continuity would render having any real conversation almost impossible.
Do lesser conversations come as a result of that? Again, sure, but you’re always going to have that especially in slow times (like the Facebook ‘is’ stories - which I actually wrote about twice ha ha).
I’m also not saying you shouldn’t write a story like this Tony - you should. It’s a potentially keen observation. I just really hope this all doesn’t devolve into people getting ticked off because others are calling them out for what they’re writing, etc. Pissed off responses to conversation posts should not be trumping the conversations themselves.
November 25th, 2007 at 8:46 am | Permalink
Actually when it went to the top slot, there were NO one else on the story on TM. I saw it there in the wee hours yesterday. This is the reason TC has 7% on TM :)
November 25th, 2007 at 11:21 am | Permalink
Tony,
It says a few things about Techmeme as well:
1. People love jumping on the bandwagon.
2. How some popular blogs such as TechCrunch have super-authority on Techmeme so anything they write immediately becomes a headline.
The other thing is the Digg-Mixx story was a non-story.
November 25th, 2007 at 11:41 am | Permalink
The funny thing is that I came across this story on techmeme, in the discussion section around the Digg/Mixx story.
It seems like there’s a whole new way to create techmeme bait- complaining about how bloggers are piling on the top headline on techmeme. We’re going to get to a point where someone gets a headline complaining about the piling on phenomenon, and then someone writes a post complaining about the piling on of that post, etc., etc., at which point no one will be able to get their facebook news fix because the tech blogosphere will be trapped in an infinite loop.
November 25th, 2007 at 11:50 am | Permalink
@Allen — no question. I was merely stating that the discussion only occurred after the fact and because it was at the top; would a similar number of bloggers been inclined to discuss the issue if it was at the bottom? (I don’t think so)
November 25th, 2007 at 11:57 am | Permalink
@Joe — I agree its useful to focus conversations; sometimes, however, the corollary is that sometimes conversations happen _because_ of what’s at the top of Techmeme, and not because it might be intrinsically worthwhile to write about. I know I’m tempted that way, personally.
November 25th, 2007 at 12:12 pm | Permalink
Tony - when I saw that story shoot to the top - I wondered why. I still can’t figure out why it shot to the top immediately. There are plenty of other stories worth listing as well.
Gabe did tell me that he changed some things to make it harder for stories without links to make it to the page. Which means that sites like mine and yours might soon disappear from tm all together. Naturally any story on TC (and a couple others) will have one site linking to it. I used to be able to get one of my stories onto TM (at least on the weekend). I would think my Propeller story is worth a TM mention. But unless anyone links to it, it won’t make it. So my #24 rank continues to drop - now at about #70.
But to answer your question, if the post was on the bottom, I would agree less would be written about it - especially if it didn’t stay in the top right menu for an extended period.
November 25th, 2007 at 12:23 pm | Permalink
@Mark — glad thing you agree with me on the non-story-ness issue of it; and in fact, its the thing which makes the observation about Techmeme possible.
As for TC having super-authority, that too is something that … gee, I don’t know … maybe Gabe wants to tweak a bit. Sometimes there are three or four TC stories in Techmeme for any given time of the day, for no other reason (apparent reason) than it has #1 status on the leaderboard, with apparently twice as much pull as CNet.
November 25th, 2007 at 12:28 pm | Permalink
Tony and Allen - I agree that TechMeme top posts are driving too much of the tech blog dialog now, though I think Gabe is always tweaking things. He may find that he needs to be more proactive in driving what makes it to the top and stop weighting the big blogs are highly as he appears to do with TechCrunch, though I’m still not clear if they make it to the top from TechMeme’s authority rank or because the stories they cover are heavily referenced (via links or keywords) because so many read them.
There may be analogies to the problems back when Google was rapidly taking over search and people would “write for Google”, using various SEO tricks to get better ranks even if that writing was not as good as natural writing.
November 25th, 2007 at 1:12 pm | Permalink
@Allen — re: link love to push you onto Techmeme — you know I’ve always got your back. ;)
http://www.deepjiveinterests.com/2007/11/25/propeller-a-good-second-fiddle-to-digg/
November 25th, 2007 at 1:16 pm | Permalink
@Joe — some good points, although personally I think that the #trackbacks and inbound links to any given story on Techmeme is clearly not as important (to me) as the blog writing said story.
There are loads of times when stories hit TM without an dialogue / in bound links.
I think the difficulty is that as TM is algorithmic, and clearly because there’s a high weighting to LB authority, you get this kind of phenomenon happening.
November 25th, 2007 at 2:15 pm | Permalink
Thanks Tony! I gave you love in the YouTube down post :)
November 25th, 2007 at 5:23 pm | Permalink
[...] — who has mentioned it in comments on Rob Hyndman’s post and on TechCrunch — and Tony Hung of DJI, I am puzzled by Mike Arrington’s post on Mixx and how “Digg refugees” are [...]
November 25th, 2007 at 5:24 pm | Permalink
[...] — who has mentioned it in comments on Rob Hyndman’s post and on TechCrunch — and Tony Hung of DJI, I am puzzled by Mike Arrington’s post on Mixx and how “Digg refugees” are [...]