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).

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.

So you may have heard that Yahoo! snapped up BuzzTracker, a rather small potato in a field of news/blog aggregators, for a cool $5 million dollars. The details can be found courtesy of Kara Swisher at AllThingsD.com over here.

Like Mat Ingram, I haven’t paid anything but a cursory look at BuzzTracker because it just doesn’t serve me as well as other meme trackers, namely Techmeme. Furthermore, its layout isn’t as dense (or concise, if you will), leading to pages and pages of endless scrolling. And that’s besides the comment spam that’s left behind some well-meaning (or not) BuzzTracker employees/evangelists/new media graffiti artists.

What *is* kind of interesting, however, is the announcement that Buzztracker *will* introduce one thing that other meme/news trackers *don’t* have. Yeah, I’m talking about Techmeme, Megite, Tailrank, (but not my new favourite news aggregator, see my next post).

And that’s a layer of discussion and community right over the daily topics.

I think this is a very good — and smart — thing for BuzzTracker, because it will allow BuzzTracker to directly host conversations, rather than, for example, readers being ‘forced’ to leave comments on respective blogs. Because, let’s face it — not everyone blogs.

By doing this, it can actively cultivate and “own” a proper community of readers in a way that none of the other news aggregators are actively doing.

Furthermore, it makes total sense when you consider what kind of jolt it will get just by being part of the Yahoo! family — and that readers from Yahoo! will precisely be the kind of people who might participate on news topics. Casual ones, without necessarily wanting to read blogs, or, who might not own a blog.

Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, it will have the benefit of getting the trickle down traffic from the parent company to power these conversations.  Because let’s face it — having no discussions when its an offered feature is probably worse than having no discussion feature at all.