Techmeme Leaderboard: The Newest Whuffie Face Score

Posted by Karoli in News, Technology October 2nd, 2007

There is no popularity contest on this planet that I will win. That much has been plain to me since my days in middle school and beyond. I am far too opinionated and contrarian to be popular, and that’s fine. It no longer fazes me, though it did in my younger days. But Twitter and the Techmeme Leaders are alit tonight with all the Techmeme Leaderboard talk. Snippets:

Marshall Kirkpatrick (who writes for Read/Write/Web and formerly wrote for Techcrunch, both on the top of the leaderboard) twittered: ” one of the things I like about Techmeme is seeing who is discussing, not headlining. FranticIndustries re the leaderboard? I’ll read that”

Dave Winer: “Fred Wilson noticed that on the new TechMeme list, his blog is the sixth written by a person. Mine is first.”

Robert Scoble twittered: “the robot said she didn’t like me being on the TechMeme top 100 list.” (the robot helicopter that attacked him…)

Techmeme’s Leaderboard is the newest Whuffie, a way to measure one’s value based on attention and buzz. In Scott Westerfeld’s world, it’s called a “face score”. Technorati calls it “authority”, though it’s okay with me not to have a very high degree of authority with a search engine that has Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan consistently at the top of their top search terms.

If you were from a different planet, like say, the living room of Mr. and Mrs. Average Internet User where AOL is king, you might land on the Techmeme 100 and think you’d found all the authority there was to find around the technology hub. You’d also think that the individual voices writing with any Whuffie at all are all men. I found two links to woman-authored posts on the discussions around the men-authored headlines. There may indeed be more, but I wasn’t going to sort through the 7,000+ blogs for them on Technorati and Techmeme’s discussions didn’t cough up any nuggets other than these:

Donna Bogatin at Insider Chatter: “One thing is certain: Every 20 minutes, 100 people with a stake in tech reporting will NOT find the Techmeme Leaderboard infuriating. AND, for the not so silent majority, the next shot at Leaderbaord glory will always be but 19 minutes away!”

Jeneane Sessum at Allied: “I have to note, I see two things: high profile traditional media outlets and a lot of popular white tech guys. Where are the Michelle Arringtons? The Darla Winers? The Jackie Jarvises? The GigaOphelias? Dude, who moved my uterus?”

We have just moved into fiction merged with pseudo-reality. This leaderboard is The Newest Shiny Thing, only this time the stakeholders are going to work very, very hard to hold their standing as the Techmeme Leaders, the Popular Ones, leaving voices which are unique, different, and offer a new spin on things in the dust, I’m afraid. Steven Hodson over at WinExtra notes that “it has made it even harder for the run of the mill blog to be considered as being successful.” 

I’m not a fan of personality-driven reputation economies. They’re what puts Britney Spears and OJ Simpson at the top of the six o’clock news to the detriment of far more important stories.   Right now, the top story on Techmeme should not be about an ego list. It should be about telling the stories of the Myanmar bloggers who are struggling to get the word out of what they are enduring behind their closed network walls. The top of Techmeme should be telling the story of how, once again, the Bush administration is manufacturing tales to justify a plan to bomb Iran.  It should be telling the story of Verizon and AT&T’s end-user agreements forcing censorship down the throats and pipes of their subscribers.

But it’s not.  Nor do I expect that in the future.  Someday the archives of Techmeme will read like the rolls of those senior-year popularity awards — the most-likelies, the funnies, the serious, the geeks, the nerds, the cliques, the non-descript quiet ones who crept around and ended up making a fortune later in life.  Maybe they weren’t on the high school lists, but they’ve always got the Techmeme 100 to aspire to.

Fact, or fiction?

“Well, don’t just sit there,” she said. “You know what you’ve got to do.”

“What?” I said, involuntarily irritated by her tone.

She looked at me like I was being deliberately stupid. “He’s got to get back on top. Cleaned up, dried out, into some productive work. Get that
Whuffie up, too. Then he can kill himself with dignity.”

- Cory Doctorow, “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom“

“Tech-heads” flaunt their latest gadgets, “kickers” spread gossip and trends, and “surge monkeys” are hooked on extreme plastic surgery. And it’s all monitored on a bazillion different cameras. The world is like a gigantic game of American Idol. Whoever is getting the most buzz gets the most votes. Popularity rules.

- Cover blurb for Extras by Scott Westerfeld

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

Sphere: Related Content


Leave a comment Comment RSS

Previous: Counting down to Extras!
Next: Oddball

Viewing 5 Comments

    • ^
    • v
    As a fellow opinionated contrarian (read - cranky old fart) blogger I think I share much of your feelings about this obsession with "the next shiny new thing". You make mention of of what is happening in Burma which I truly displays a real lack of social conscience in this so era of Web 2.0 "do no evil".

    We seem to be more concerned with qualifying and quantifying social networks and social graphs rather than giving a damn about real social issues. If we did then survivors of Katrina wouldn't still be living in FEMA trailers, [middle class] poverty wouldn't be a growing dividing line between technological class separation.

    Thank you for an excellent post and I've added your blog to my RSS feeds.
    • ^
    • v
    Respectfully, Ditto. And thank you.
    • ^
    • v
    Thanks to you both for your comments. I noticed the discussion more or less died out today, but I'll bet there's a lot of eyes on that leaderboard.

    Back when Twitter was all the rage (in March), I was shouting out as loudly as I could about the Julie Amero case and the injustice of the clash between technology and the law. I tried as hard as I could to get someone -- anyone in the "higher blogosphere order" for lack of a better term, to put a louder voice to it than I.

    Yet all I saw, over and over again, was more "Twitter is the new blog, yada yada" and no one could really take the few minutes to shout out about Julie, except for Cory Doctorow and the folks over at BoingBoing. And even when it did catch a little bit, no one really went in depth with it.

    Now we're seeing tons of people under prosecution for possession of images, videos, etc. who were stupid enough or unfortunate enough to use peer-to-peer file sharing on unprotected computers and download material without discretion as to what it really might be. And still, no real tech voices beyond the antivirus and antispyware folks.

    Maybe I should create a PayPerPost opportunity for folks to blog it...would anyone listen then? No, it'd probably still be all about Facebook.
    • ^
    • v
    I remember the Amero case well Karoli and as an aside it was well covered by the security related blogs like Threat Level, Freedom to Tinker and Sunbelt Blog which is the home blog for Sunbelt Software (Kerio Firewall etc) of which Alex the CEO of Sunbelt was one of the first to come to her rescue. He also testified free of charge as an expert witness for her defense.

    But the large point you are trying to make I do agree with - the tech blogosphere in general - and the more popular they are - glosses of social issues with very little involvement past a single line in a post or such. Instead they will bitch at the drop of a hat if their iPod has a scratch or they will discauss ad naseum the merits of social networks over social graphs.

    kind of sad in a way.
    • ^
    • v
    Hi Steven,

    Oh, the contributions of Alex and all of the volunteers are not to be minimized in Julie's case, nor was I trying to. But one link from Robert Scoble to Alex's blog, or an orchestrated outcry about it from the so-called A-listers at the time would have made a world of difference. As it was, they ultimately blogged it after the fact.

    The people who made the difference were Alex, et all and the knitters and food bloggers and other ordinary people who got the word out and dug into their pockets to give to Julie's defense fund. Just imagine how much easier their job would have been had they had some megaphones from the top dogs.
 

Trackbacks

(Trackback URL)

close Reblog this comment
Powered by Disqus · Learn more
blog comments powered by Disqus