Comments on: The Power Of Techmeme Over Bloggers is … Pretty Astounding.

By: Of Digg “refugees” and Mixx - - mathewingram.com/media

Of Digg “refugees” and Mixx - - mathewingram.com/media — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 22:24:05 +0000

[...] — 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 [...]

By: Of Digg “refugees” and Mixx - - mathewingram.com/work

Of Digg “refugees” and Mixx - - mathewingram.com/work — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 22:23:20 +0000

[...] — 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 [...]

By: Allen Stern

Allen Stern — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 19:15:24 +0000

Thanks Tony! I gave you love in the YouTube down post :)

By: Tony Hung

Tony Hung — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 18:16:08 +0000

@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.

By: Tony Hung

Tony Hung — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 18:12:40 +0000

@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/

By: Joe Duck

Joe Duck — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 17:28:43 +0000

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.

By: Tony Hung

Tony Hung — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 17:23:03 +0000

@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.