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?

Technorati Tags: Techmeme, Twitter, fiction, reputation economy, popularity contest, authority

DG has been waiting for this book for over a year…Me too. Cory Doctorow gave it a nice review here. More on this soon…DG and I will be fighting over the book soon enough.

I wish the bookstores were open at midnight like they were for Harry Potter.

Technorati Tags: Extras, Scott Westerfeld, Uglies series