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).

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.

I love Techmeme as much as the next blogger, and I don’t really get fussed about the Leaderboard (primarily because I have never been on it, although there are other indicators that perhaps no one is really listening to my overblown gasbaggery anyway), but a couple thoughts on this:

Its good for what it does: and what it does is provide a snapshot of news and conversations for the past 24 h or so.  The problem is that it pre-picks which conversations to monitor.  As Dave Winer noted, its possible to get included into those conversations pretty easily, but its not a given to just link to the headlining meme.  Nevertheless, there are a host of bottom-sucking morays — such as myself — who like to participate in the discussion, but who that is tends to be predictable.

It could get gamed: as any complex system can.  One way would be to get several blogs — see bottom-sucking morays above, or better yet, a leaderboarder — to point to a single story or post.   Now, I haven’t yet seen anything which even suggests that this has happened, but its possible.  At one point I was writing for Deep Jive Interests, the Blog Herald and Problogger (earlier this year).  I was tempted to try it, but what would be the point in that?

It makes me lazy: as a tech blogger who needs to review a wide variety of sources, it makes me really, really lazy.  And this is a function of its leaderboard, as it naturally weights some blogs / news sources more than others.  That’s why TechCrunch can headline a story in and of itself without any pointing discussions to it, irrespective of its intrinsic worth as a story (I mean, this would be difficult to measure without any specific metric, such as inbound links).

So for upcoming stories and a wide breadth of stuff, I like Blogrunner.  It lists stories as they come out (such as Fred Wilson’s post, which I picked up within 30 minutes of him posting it), whereas Techmeme has a few hour (or few day) lead in.  Secondly, its own list of blogs / news sites that it scans seems larger, so it gives the appearance of a real diversity of opinion (whether or not such a thing actually exists in the blogosphere is to be debated for another time).  The problem with Blogrunner, though, is its layout in that its not as easy to scan the page for the headlines you want.

But as for my own leading question — have “curated feeds” stopped you from reading RSS feeds?  I don’t know.  Let’s talk about it, because I can see how for some, it might.  There’s a lot of news out there, and it takes time to build a good OPML file (why there’s no easy way to search for these things and share them is beyond me), in addition to reading it all.  I’ll admit that I’ve caved into the lazy temptation of getting others to “curate” their feeds for me, whether it be Scoble, Blogrunner or Techmeme.

Could I be getting a skewed view of things? Of course.

But I think as long as I _know_ they’re skewed … well, I think that’s all that really matters, doesn’t it?

My new favourite news aggregator, however, is one that you may not have heard of.  Its called Blogrunner.

There are a couple of reasons why.

1. Its fast: Compared to other news aggregators, Blogrunner actively shows news and blog stories from feeds that it follows as they show up on the original source.  I have no idea how it determines “importance” for which stories it picks to show, but amongst the stories that show up under a middle column called “latest news”, it actually displays news as it comes in.  For other news aggregators it might take hours to show up after it was original published.  Furthermore, the time stamp on Blogrunner under those stories are the exact time that the stories were released on the actual and original website — not, when it showed up on Blogrunner.  That bit about Facebook being “hacked” a month ago?  I picked that up on Blogrunner as it displayed the Techcrunch story about 1 hours after it was posted on TechCrunch (where it correctly displayed “1 hour”).

2. Its organized: I like being able to scan and read as much information as possible, and Blogrunner allows you to do this efficiently.  There’s a middle column which features “Featured” news headlines, but also “Latest” headlines (see above).  The left column, on the other hand, features popular news headlines which are determined by a number of factors (the actual number aren’t published).   Once you click through to a given headline, it gives you the option seeing other blog reactions and snippits from their blogs, related blogs, related articles, and other works that are either authored by, or mention the author.  Furthermore, there is a very little used option to comment directly on the story, which is a feature that no other news aggregator uses — BuzzTracker, however, is looking to join this field.

Now, its not perfect by any means.  I really like the ability to see blog reactions right underneath headlines a la techmeme, for example, and this feature is noticeably absent (and requires an extra click).  Its own blog is amateurishly undeveloped (and powered by WordPress as the About page proudly tells me).

On the other hand there are features which make it a fairly versatile and comprehensive piece of technology, most of which I haven’t even talked about here, such as being able to sort stories by “threading them”, by source, or even by Latest.

If you haven’t had a chance to check out Blogrunner have a go and let me know what you think.  Its certainly my new favourite news aggregator these days.