UPDATE 4/15/08 @ 2347h: Some sophomoric geekish “humour” above, but as Jason mentioned below, this post is #1 on meme13 right now.

In a well-meaning gesture, Rogers Cadenhead has whipped up some code that tracks the last 13 bloggers on the Techmeme Leaderboard 100, called Meme13, in an effort to spread the word about lesser known bloggers.  It turns out that this very blog is on the bottom 13 (I feel like this is American Idol, or something), but I’m not in bad company: Mark Cuban’s Blog Maverick is down there, as is Darren Rowse’s Problogger.net,  Thomas Hawke’s blog.

Look, I am not pretending that this blog is great, but its certainly not “new” (granted, circa 2006 isn’t vintage either); but those kind of methodological issues aren’t really what stand out.

What does is the fact that — irrespective of the engine behind it (I mean, it could be monkeys skimming the Techmeme leaderboard, for all that I understand about how it could be coded) — Meme13 is simply pulling feeds and republishing them all.

Like any good ol’ scraper blog.

Now, perhaps Rogers wasn’t around this weekend, but one of the larger memes was around Shyftr and how *IT* was pulling full feeds and republishing them (well, that was one aspect of it).  I didn’t think it was such a hot idea, and others didn’t as well.  In fact, there may be legal ramifications for republishing RSS feeds that two professionals (one lawyer, one consultant) weighed in on.

Ultimately, Shyftr ended up changing their policies (to some degree).  And what do we get today?  More of the GD same — and what’s really funny (again, not in a ha ha way) is not even that Meme13 acknowledges what side of the debate its on, but that its apparently deaf to one of the bigger memes on the leaderboard that its supposedly tracking, and, one of the “bottom 13″ that it wants to highlight who felt pretty vocal about the issue (me)!

I am flabbergasted, exhausted, and … just flabbergasted.

I have neither the time, nor inclination to serve DMCA notices, so maybe, like a bunch of people have suggested, I’ll go back to serving partial feeds after all.

Ah, Techmeme. The news aggregator bloggers love to love (or hate with equal measure). Two months ago I bemoaned how it wasn’t picking up what I perceived to be the most important news item (but eventually did).

Today I bemoan how long it takes to pick up news, period.

Techmeme does a great many things right, but I’ve found that news can take many, many, many hours for it to get picked up, especially if stuff is broken on the non-elite (my new word for the Super A-list) blogs.

Exhibit A, today, is the fact that Shyftr, the service that I have allegedly thrown under the bus, has rectified the item that I brayed so loudly about, which in turn, led to the leading news node on Techmeme for the weekend.

It would be nice if Techmeme picked this up in a timely fashion, but unfortunately, because it hasn’t been picked up by the blogs that are in its top 10 leaderboard, it won’t — at least for several more hours, perhaps, although the announcement was made on the official blog almost 6 hours ago.

Why is timeliness important? Only that on Techmeme the day of the week does make a difference. Come Monday morning, there is usually a deluge of stories, and, if even if they aren’t of any particular importance, they’ll usually wash out, in terms of volume, other stories, particularly if they aren’t linked to in any great degree.

If it never makes it up onto Techmeme it gives a bit of a skewed perspective of Shyftr, and an unfair one to anyone who only reads Techmeme (or its headlines). If it makes it so slowly that it gets washed out by other news that will also be unfortunate.

My hope is that since Louis and Mat (and Mashable) at the very least of spoken of it (also me), perhaps it will show up soon; but perhaps this is one reason why relying on algorithms entirely, while alluring, does need a fail safe. There are some important bits of news that are intrinsically worthwhile, and yet, because of the relative weaknesses (according to the algorithm) in who is linking and writing, news may not show up in time, if at all.

(Although, in truth, important news not showing up at all rarely happens)

Update: And sure enough … it has shown itself within minutes of this post going up (yay!)

Contrary to what some believe, Newspond, the latest entry into the news aggregator scene, isn’t really teh awesome. Here’s the two second run down: it aggregators news, like Techmeme.  It allows you to comment, like Digg.

Sure, there’s a fancy Ajax-y kind of wrapper around it, and there’s a way to sort out stories that are popular amongst different time periods, amongst other things.

My two second take on it is that — you know, maybe for people with 30 inch displays, it works.  But for someone with an average 19 inch display, you just can’t absorb enough information at a glance.  The reason why Techmeme works for me (and Megite, and Blogrunner) is that they are all “no frills” in their appearance.  I get to see headlines — lots of headlines, organized and indented in such a way that I recognize at a *glance* the hierarchy of news {its also why I likes popurls}.

Could Techmeme learn a thing or three from Newspond?  Sure.  (Where’s that search function, Gabe?)

But is it revolutionary?  … to borrow a word from Newspond’s own lexicon — “meh”.  They’ll have to tighten up the design and usability up a few ratchets before I change that into a “yea”.

A rather apropros piece, this about “email apnea”, courtesy of the Huffington Post, pimped by Robert Scoble, while in turn was of course reflexively promoted by Techmeme (and other news aggregators, possibly). “Apnea” referring to a period of time where one stops breathing, often heard or known as “The Apnea” (see Seinfeld), or the more medicalized term, “obstructive sleep apnea”.

The gist of things is that apparently people hold their breath while reading their email (and possibly twittering), thus, it is inferred that its part of their sympathetic system working in over time. The sympathetic system is responsible for driving up blood pressure, and is related to the “flight or fight” response, and is the cause of “stress”. Stress == “bad”, ergo, reading your email is bad.

So, why is all this “apropos”? Only because I’m studying for my Royal College Exams at the moment — and in fact, should not be blogging as much as I already have been over the past few days.

Anywhoo, as I’m clearly at my keyboard, I should take two seconds to point out a couple things, as I am in the unique position to straddle between two universes (the “medical” and internet geekery — both vaguely defined).

First of all, observing your friends and family holding their breath hardly constitutes anything remotely scientific. Hmmm. That’s harsher than I meant it to sound.

Rather, the observations of a few dozen people are hardly something to base a generalization upon. That is, just because you observe a few people holding their breath doesn’t mean that its something that many other people do.

Even *if* that supposition were true — and the only way to do it would be to do something boring, like a study, with enough people to make sure the differences were statistically important — you are *still* lumping another inference on top of that.

And that is that the supposed breath holding while reading email (or Twitter, or blogging) is in fact, a sympathetically-derived response, or, for that matter, a sympathetic-system *inducing* response.

Thirdly, even *IF* you were able to find an association of *that* you would then have to find another association: that the sympathetic-activating process of holding your breath while reading email, twittering, or blogging, is in fact significant in and of itself, when you compare it to *OTHER* sympathetically activating processes that you do during the day.

Running for a bus. Worrying about your kids. Playing computer games. Getting mad at your boss. Watching your favourite television show.

And that’s besides defining what “significant” really is. Is raising your blood pressure significant? Because that’s really just a surrogate for having an actual stroke or heart attack, or say, just plain ol’ dying.

Now, I’m being facetious, of course (mostly), but I’m doing it to prove a point (and not that I am sometimes a bit of a twat).

Ms. Stone makes several leaps in logic in her piece, although its clear she’s tried to do some legwork for it. It context, the purpose was logical, since it makes for a great piece: in a publication (Huffington Post) that targets mainly white collar folks who probably *do* do a lot of email reading (they’re reading a blog, aren’t they?), she’s identifying a seemingly obvious finding (breath holding) that seems benign, but shockingly, may have serious medical consequences, but that no one has identified yet.

What’s my point in all of this?

Just how important media — and perhaps, medical — literacy is in this great big world of New Media. That its important to really question the kinds of stories and propositions you come along, as more and more people are becoming self-publishers after a fact (blogging), or contributing to such publications.

In this particular piece, coming to the conclusion that reading email will kill you is tantalizing, in a kind of tabloidish kind of way, and even makes sense from a kitchen-sink kind of logic if you follow the piece.

Specifically with this post, and with all due respect to Ms. Stone, there are several *large* caveats with the leaps in logic she makes, and its important that in the discourse of things, its pointed out.
In “new media”, I find that the need to vet stories is obviously less strong, as the need to have content and be first becomes the first priority. We’ve often seen in the Tech side of the blogosphere that this kind of attitude is “ok” so long as the original post is updated.

Bottom line isn’t a ground breaking one, but its one that can’t be said enough:

Think for yourself, and if you’ve having a hard time doing that (I know I do, especially when I’m tired) *look* for other people who *are* thinking for themselves. People who are writing in the comments section. Or other opinions on other blogs.

Thoughtful analysis is what makes the blogosphere great — and is an absolute necessity, if you’re to get anything out of it, particularly if you’re not a blogger, and have no platform to officially contribute that thought process on.

[Medical Geekery Warning: as an aside, most kinds of apnea occur in a process that isn’t often controllable by you; sleep apnea, for example, occurs when you’re sleeping. The problem with sleep apnea, is that some people have as dozens, perhaps as many as 50, or 100 of these episodes per hour while they’re sleeping {the latter would be “severe”}. The reason *why* the body is doing this is to wake itself up temporarily to restore body tone, so that it can breath — in REM sleep, your body loses all muscle tone, and in obstructive sleep apnea, your upper airway passages collapse, so that you cannot, breath hence the apnea bit. What’s the effect of your body trying to wake itself up, possibly several hundred times a night over several hours? Studies have shown this has complicated effects, including raising the heart rate, blood pressure, and even cause thickening of the heart, even *after* you wake up, and that it can raise your chances for heart attack, fatal heart rhythms and stroke. So, is this like reading email? My humble opinion is probably not. And that’s because the kind of sympathetic drive you might get while you’re having apneic episodes is probably huge and maintained over several hours while you sleep as your body is fighting the urge to get oxygen, as low oxygen levels are the trigger to “wake up”. On an average day, reading emails of average importance, on the other hand, is probably several orders of magnitude lower than this.]

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.

This is Mat Ingram’s post over here, where he talks a little bit about how Techmeme diversifying to non-blogs is a good thing — and that the good ol’ blogosphere in the good ol’ days, sounds a little bit like a good ol’ boys club.

Well, that’s how I’m reading it, anyway. ;)

He’s intending for the title of his joke to be a joke, but there’s no secret that getting inbound blogs to link to a post is one way to promote that post on Techmeme.

In that vein, I’m happy to write a post and push it up for the sake of pushing it up.

Go, Mat, Go, Go!