There's been a lot of discussion over the past 24 hours on the new Techmeme Leaderboard, which is a list of the top 100 sources for the popular tech news aggregator - calculated over the past 30 days. The Leaderboard updates daily and each site is ranked with a "presence" indicator, defined as "the percentage of headline space a source occupies over the 30-day period".
Read/WriteWeb was ranked #6 in the opening list and it has a "presence" of 1.90. As a publisher, I'm proud that R/WW is ranked so highly. To be placed ahead of BBC and Wall St Journal on such a list is awesome. Of course, there are biases in the Leaderboard, but Techmeme creator Gabe Rivera argues in his blog post that biases are present in any automated news aggregator or search engine. See also our own Marshall Kirkpatrick's critique about other aspects of the list. So it's not a perfect measurement, but in the niche of tech news I'd argue it's better than most. Indeed, if you look at how Google News ranks news sources - it doesn't even let R/WW and other 'new media' sites in, so there is a much larger bias right there. Slashdot also has an ongoing bias against blogs, preferring to link to old media sources.
Which brings me to the reaction from several bloggers that the Leaderboard doesn't have many "blogs" in it. Ben Metcalfe wrote that 33% of the sources aren't blogs at all. I would argue that figure's even higher. Because Read/WriteWeb isn't a blog and hasn't been for some time - at least in the classic definition of a blog as a personal journal. For quite some months now, I've been referring to Read/WriteWeb as a "media business" or a "media property". R/WW used to be a blog, back when I was the only writer and I blogged in the evenings. But sometime last year, it became my full-time job. Then it became a business, and now it's a media property.
Let me clarify one thing though - I'm still a "blogger", as are Marshall and Josh and the other R/WW writers. But Read/WriteWeb has evolved into something different than a blog, which is traditionally thought of as the voice of a single person. Dave Winer, one of the pioneers of blogging, also says that the voice must be unedited. This is clearly not the case with R/WW, which has multiple bloggers and also a strong editorial stance. The same is true at Techcrunch, Gigaom, PaidContent et al.
I think Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 nailed this issue when he wrote that Techmeme is "dominated by media brands". As Scott said:
"The Techmeme Leaderboard demonstrates the convergence of new media and traditional media — with new media becoming more brand-driven, and traditional media becoming more individual voice and talent driven."
Nothing illustrates the current 'new media' landscape more, for me personally, than the fact I spend more time these days running this business than blogging. The bigger, and far more important, picture though is that the top (and aspiring) blogs have evolved into media companies. It's almost comparing apples to oranges to compare Techcrunch to Scripting News, or Read/WriteWeb to Fred Wilson's blog - even though we may write about the same things often.
Lastly, to the most extreme position yet stated (always a good way to get Techmeme juice!). Robert Scoble thinks the Techmeme Leaderboard may herald "the death of blogging". But let's be honest, it's been "dying" ever since social networks like MySpace and Bebo came along - which is where many young people do their personal blogging these days. And now it's Twitter for a certain tech-centric part of the blogging population.
But one thing hasn't changed and hopefully never will - the best bloggers are passionate about the topics they write about, and they are informed and opinionated. All the writers on Read/WriteWeb have those attributes. So even though we're not a blog, we're still bloggers ;-)
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I agree with that, and think its good you treat "blogging", "blogger" and "blog" as separate concepts. This discussion does remind me of the chatter earlier in January about what is a blog re googles no comment policy on its official blog.
I suppose the question now is: what is a blogger? Someone who writes in the first person? That's what I said in a previous post, where I liken the concept of blogging to editoral pages in a newspaper - opinionated and personal./
Posted by: Elias Bizannes | October 1, 2007 11:07 PM
The issue isn't how many "real" blogs are in the list, nor that it signals the end of blogging. Quite the opposite. The list is anticlimactic. You could pick 20 of the 100 on the list to subscribe to and hardly miss a story at all. That's the problem aggregating aggregators in a medium where information friction is almost nil. Everyone writes the same stories over and over again.
The interesting perspectives are not the 100, it's the 101-200, precisely because they're off the radar screen where nobody sees them. If you want to visit new worlds, you have to sail off the edge of the known world:
http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2007/10/01/the-internet-first-breeds-diversity-then-conformity-punctuated-equilibrium/
Posted by: Bob Warfield | October 1, 2007 11:19 PM
Interesting post, Richard.
I think that the new media landscape is evolving - and converging - so rapidly that we're seeing it shed legacy terms left, right and center. For me video is even more tumultuous, where you have ill fitting terms like (video) podcasting, vodcasting, web tv, internet tv, vlogging, web video and so on doing a poor job of describing the emerging convergence media they set out to classify.
I think that once you get to terms like "media property", though, the semantic use value is heavily diminished in terms of search, top lists, and leader boards. That said if we level the classification of delivery platforms and focus instead on the content, maybe we'll make some headway.
Posted by: Michael Pick | October 1, 2007 11:42 PM
Hi Richard--I, for one, was fascinated by the "death of blogging" posts in ref. to the Techmeme Leaderboard.
Yes, the Leaderboard *may* mean the metaphorical death (read: loss of status or audience or interest) for *some* bloggers in the tech niche--just the way that Digg and other "social news" sites are *indicators* of changes in the way *some* people track and read *some* kinds of news stories. (contrary to the PEJ's slightly hysterical report on social news sites...)
The blogosphere as a whole has changed drastically since the first Technorati Top 100 spawned much wailing and gnashing of teeth...Evidence of this can be seen in the significance other "top" lists that have been generated in the past few months--such as AdAge's Power 150 and the "W list" of women bloggers --that have cast spotlights on sectors of the blogosphere that the tech blogosphere doesn't pay full attention to. (the W list was started in response to the low percentage of women bloggers in the Power 150--which is far higher than individual women bloggers in the Leaderboard. But I'd hedge a bet there are more women individual bloggers in marketing than in tech.)
Yet these lists (as well as 2K Bloggers have made their impact. Just not on the blogs that occupy tech bloggers' sights. So, we could say This Place--this Blogosphere--is far bigger than any one entity can track any more, and tech blogging is its own niche that encompasses lots of msm sites over individual blogger sites.
Posted by: Tish Grier | October 2, 2007 7:48 AM
Good post Richard - it's interesting that you are willing to say RWW is no longer a blog - most of the other a-set aren't willing to do that yet. I have said for a long time that they will as soon as being a blog is no longer "cool".
Posted by: Allen Stern | October 2, 2007 7:58 AM
Media property to sell for 100-years earnings, right? ;-)
Posted by: PJ | October 2, 2007 9:01 AM
I love the gray area of new media, and the questions that it prompts. I don't think that all of this talk of classification should cloud the most important part, though, which is communicating.
I think that if the blogsphere shows us anything, it's how many people out there have ideas worth sharing (and, okay, some NOT). I don't necessarily like to rely on lists to show me those gems....
Posted by: Eliza Amos | October 3, 2007 9:00 PM