Update: My faith in Techmeme comes through — Techmeme finally gets it right. Yay! {albeit more than 24h after the original Reuters article was pushed out}
To be honest, Blogrunner seems to have the same “problem”.
But for my money, the death of the HD-DVD format is easily the biggest story in the technosphere. Its something many have wondered about for years, and has implications far and wide for tons of folks — not the least of whom, consumers who have been wondering about competing formats and who have been on the sidelines waiting for a winner; or, the industry, who is cognizant of the fact that as long as their was a “war”, they were on the losing end of it, while folks *did* wait for a winner (and continued/continues to download media with abandon).
Why isn’t it the top story? With all due respect to Nick Carr (who’s post on Amazon’s S3 failure has been sitting at the top all day), a niche storage solution doesn’t trump the end of the high definition wars. Hand waving explanation for all of this? Its because of the “algorithm”, man. I mean, I have no idea what the algorithm actually constitutes (I have my best guesses), but I think its clearly one of those times where an algorithm just ain’t cuttin’ it.
(and also to be fair, at the time of this posting, Megite isn’t getting it right either. Google News, however, does).
8 Comments
Good point, The format war being over does seem to be more important, I wonder if Gabe sees stuff like that and tweaks the algorithm?
The option to tweak is there; however, like others who favour algorithms, I am sure he favours the better solution, which is just to fix the darn thing so that it displays the appropriate thing after all.
(presupposing that there is something wrong in the first place)
Cheers
t @ dji
Here’s my view: while it does often pain me when Techmeme ignores a significant story, in this case, it’s the #2, which isn’t so bad, and second, the mortal wounds HD DVD has sustained of late have been in the news almost continuously. So perhaps to most bloggers, the writing has been on the wall so long, filing additional obituaries would be overkill?
While I’m not sure the S3 thing should still be the top story, I agree with Gabe’s point completely about HD-DVD’s death hardly being new news.
I feel like just personally I’ve written 10-15 stories about the death of HD-DVD since January and while yes, this seems to be the formal end, even this Toshiba pulling out story is a couple days old.
Anyone who didn’t see this coming since January is either not paying too close of attention – or was a stubborn HD-DVD early adopter :)
Oooooh — Mr. Seigler, that stings! :)
… while I understand your (and Gabe’s) point about it not being new news, I think both of your opinions say a lot about exactly how Techmeme (and its ilk) are geared.
That is to say, since the engine is powered by the opinion of industry watchers, then it will only deem important what industry watchers deem to be important.
Because you / we have been following the story for ages, its a non-issue.
But clearly, it would be important to the lay person, and I would argue, is still objectively more important than the majority of news on Techmeme *still*.
On the flip-side, the same reasoning / rationale is the reason why we see tech-blog-centric/heavy news being pushed up, when most ordinary people wouldn’t care — e.g. the ongoing identity search for Fake Steve Jobs.
But being an industry watcher, you knew that already. :)
t @ dji
I was going to mention in my first post the same point about it (format war) being old news that’s been going on for awhile and the S3 news was something new, causing it to get more attention among the bloggers, but I wasn’t sure if that would affect it getting pushed to the top. But I guess if it is like was said above and Techmeme pays more attention to what industry insiders are talking about then it makes more sense.
@Tony – Sorry, didn’t mean to sound like a d-bag in my last comment which I may have a bit :) I actually think you make a great point in your comment – people sometimes ask why I write about things that have already been talked about on places like Techmeme and the like and part of the answer is that I do in fact have readers who have no idea what Techmeme is – should they be deprived of news because of that? No, and as you state it should probably work the opposite way too.
Actually in terms of impact on people who use stuff and CARE, the niche storage thing is of VASTLY higher impact today than The HD-DVD wars. That’s completely meaningless over the long term (physical media will COMPLETELY go away). Niche storage has a lot more long-term impact.
So I suppose it depends on your point of view, short-term or long-term. “News” tends to be short-term, so it’s a fair point, but perhaps Techmeme takes the long view!
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