Your Tech News: TechMeme, Technorati, Sphere, Megite and More
As you can see from Gabe’s blog, I’m not the only who likes his site. It appears that the entire A-list of technology bloggers currently use Techmeme including Dan Farber, Michael Arrington, Vaughn Ververs, Om Malik at GigaOm, Tom Evslin - and PC World even named Mr. Rivera one of its 50 Most Important People on the Web.
According to Wikipedia, the word “meme” was coined by Richard Dawkins, a biologist and refers to:
“A ‘unit of cultural information‘ which can propagate from one mind to another in a manner analogous to genes (i.e., the units of genetic information).
Dawkins gave as examples of memes: tunes, catch-phrases, beliefs, clothes fashions, ways of making pots, or of building arches.”
Given the way blog posts can trigger more blog posts, the ‘meme’ analogy appears appropriate. In the context of the Internet, a ‘meme’ is explained on Quixtar and Wikipedia as “when something relatively unknown becomes increasingly popular, often quite suddenly, through the mass propagation of media content made feasible by the Internet technology.”
In an interview with Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand earlier in the year, Gabe Rivera outlined how TechMeme’s inclusion process works:
“So if a post on your site includes a Techmeme permalink, as opposed to linking to an article that Techmeme links to, and my system notices a moderate amount of traffic through that link, and in addition determines your site is not spammy and the referral is real, your site stands a much better chance of appearing under the Techmeme “Discussion” for the article.”
A more complete list of tips can be found on the Memeorandum website (sister site to Techmeme) here.
What Gabe and others are facilitating is very similar to the world of online contextual advertising where companies such as ContextWeb, Google and, now, Barry Diller’s IAC company, Ask.com are finding relevant ads for the user as it relates to the content they’re reading. Techmeme finds relevant news for the user as it relates to top stories in the blogosphere.
This brings us to our next, tech news site… the granddaddy of tech blogging hubs, Technorati.
Begun by David Sifry in 2002, his original blog post on the reasons for Technorati were concise:
“..create a set of web services that I’ve always wanted for myself - services layered on top of the wealth of current search functionality and tools available for bloggers. “
And among the four (4) initial, core services, the Link Cosmos remains a definining characteristic of Technorati today:
“1) Link Cosmos: This is a service that lets you see what blogs are linking to a Blog (or any arbitrary URL, btw). I always wanted this because I wanted something to help me get a feeling for how interesting a blog was - if lots of people are linking somewhere, it must be interesting, right? And If lots of people I know and respect are linking to someone or something, then it must be something worth taking seriously.”
Check out this link from the Web Archive to see how far Technorati has come from the early days.
Similar to the leveling off of the newspaper business both offline and now even online recently, Technorati has hit a plateau. Increased competition is one reason.
Eating into its business are exciting tech and non-tech news services such as Kevin Rose’s Digg, the aforementioned Techmeme, Matthew Chen’s Megite, Mashable’s MashTracker (now you can easily track the conversation about and within Mashable, the social networking blog), Chuquet, Blogniscient, Tony Conrad’s Sphere (in action at the bottom of every ContextWeb blog post) and many others that track news - and people talking about the news.
But, that’s not the only reason Technorati’s has plateaued - and it’s something with which all, new 2.0 news companies must cope.
BusinessWeek’s Heather Green recently reported that the entire blogosphere has hit a plateau after it picked up on Sifry’s State of The Live Web report :
“I emailed [Davide Sifry] to drill into a couple of the numbers, prompted by questions at Matthew Hurst and Steve Rubel’s blogs. The data Sifry sent back seems to show that blogging growth is plateauing.”
Most importantly, Business Week’s Green points out:
“There has been slight decrease in the number of English-language posts.
The number of daily English language posts dropped to 495,000 in March from 507,000 in October.
In other words, in October 2006, 39% of blog posts were in English. In March 2007, only 33% were in in English.
In his email Sifry says, ‘My conclusion is that we’re still seeing growth in the blogosphere, but that the growth is slowing.’
With a half million posts per day, there still seems to be plenty of room for new players in the tech news aggregation space. It will be interesting to see how the next steps of tech/blog news tracking evolves. To be sure, Technorati, Techmeme and the rest remain important parts of my daily news diet.
Just wish I had more time to read - don’t we all.
Related News: Sphere Announces 1.2, Sphere Blog, Megite’s Matthew Chen Interview
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