One of the things that has been interesting about Techmeme is that it somehow managed to avoid the standard blogosphere "cycle of love and destruction"

What I mean is that there is a cycle to every product that becomes the darling of the blogoshpere.  Bloggers tend to (a) fall in love with a product, (b) talk endlessly about said product, (c) start to get annoyed with the product and finally (d) completely turn on the product to the point where they endlessly bash it (even though it remains essentially unchanged from the time when they loved it). 

This cycle has played out more times than I can count over the years with products of all shapes and sizes.  Everything from the iPod to Facebook have fallen prey to this cycle at one point or another. 

That is, everything but Techmeme.

Sure there has been the occasional bias accusation but Techmeme seems to have skipped the attack part and instead simply stopped being the topic of conversation.  That is, until now.  Lately there has been an endless parade of Techmeme bashing (the latest comes from Duncan Riley) seemingly determined to do whatever possible to make the site seem irrelevant. 

This is fascinating to me and I've been trying to determine exactly why this is.  What I've come up with is this...

Blame it On Twitter

As odd as it sounds I think a lot of this has to do with Twitter's downtime. 

Twitter was, in the cycle outlined above, entering into "stage d" as more and more people started to turn on it.  The problem is, in most cases, the criticism being levied in this last stage isn't justified.  Facebook for example hadn't changed when Scoble started to bash it for having a 500 person friend limit he just picked that moment to turn on it.

So when Twitter actually started deserving every bit of criticism levied at it the complainers thunder was stolen.  No one was there to defend it which meant there was really nothing to discuss and that left those who would normally attack it for the next couple months with a bunch of negative energy to expend and no target to expend it on.

Enter Techmeme, an old faithful service that had never been the target of everyone's ire before. 

Gabe's Big Mistake

When someone is trashing you for no good reason the worst thing you can do is give them a response.  That's exactly what Gabe Rivera (creator of Techmeme) has been doing lately and the end result has been an endless stream of attacks.

This is because, whether people are conscious of it or not, they attack to get a rise out of the person they are attacking.  So giving them that satisfaction just fuels the fire and encourages more attacks. 

The referenced Inquisitr post above is the perfect example of what I'm talking about.  I like Duncan Riley, he was always my favorite Techcrunch writer and the number of times I've linked to the Inquisitr in the last few months should indicate that I'm still a fan.  But this falling out with Mike Arrington has really caused him to stray into some unseemly territory and the post he made on Techmeme is clearly a dig at some kind of perceived relationship between Techmeme and Techcrunch. 

So Mr. Rivera choosing to respond to it will just encourage others to write similar attacks in the future

Pay deference to the A-List or they'll make you pay

FriendFeed, despite what people say, is no where close to doing what Techmeme does.  Techmeme is a memetracker while FriendFeed is essentially a RSS Reader with a few nifty features.  It does nothing that Google Shared Items didn't do before it.

Yet over and over again you hear how FriendFeed is taking the place of Techmeme.

But what's interesting about that claim is (a) it's made almost exclusively by A-Listers and (b) it's generally made by those A-Listers that have not been enjoying success on Techmeme lately.  Which leads me to believe the argument is really just an outgrowth of their resentment of Techmeme.

Like the jilted lover who claims he "didn't like his ex-girlfriend that much anyway" these A-Listers denounce Techmeme as no longer relevant because they are no longer the center of it.

So what is to be done?

Honestly I think the most important thing to remember here is that all the blogosphere's past targets are still standing.  iPods, Facebook, and even Twitter are all still going strong and will continue to do so.  If I were Mr. Rivera I'd go out of my way not to respond to attacks on Techmeme anymore (as I said above) but beyond that this is more of a "weather the storm" situation than it is a "proactively do something" situation. 

If there's a lesson to be learned here it's simply that every product that gains focus in the blogosphere will eventually get beaten up by it.  Even if you don't follow the traditional cycle your time will come and you just have to be mentally prepared for it.

Duncan Riley of The Inquisitr writes a post on the "bitchmeme" phenomenon of Techmeme entitled "Techmeme and the Noise Problem".  In it he says...

Bitchmeming about Techmeme has long been a favorite past-time of bored early adopters over numerous weekends in the last year. The arguments are usually similar, and revolve around variations of Techmeme is to focused on reporting news from large companies and/ or ignores small startups, and that it is dominated by a few sites while others don’t get a look in.

To be honest, I don't really think this is a problem.  In fact, I'll go even further and say I think trying to "fix" this would be a problem. 

(In fairness Mr. Riley makes the same point in his post and I'm really just elaborating on what he said.  But he said it in a way that was awkward to quote because it required combining two non consecutive paragraphs which, when done, made it look like he was making an entirely different point)

The important thing to remember here is the definition of a meme tracker.  It's a tool that tracks topics across a certain community segment.  For Techmeme to do what Mr. Riley is asking it would have to actively supplant the community's judgement for its own.  At that point it stops being a meme tracker and becomes just another news site. 

Meme Trackers, as the name implies, track the community.  If Bitchmemes arise it's because that's what the community was interested in (whether they want to admit it or not). 

On that note there is a solution to the problem outlined above and it's a simple one.  It's called the Inquisitr, or TechCrunch, or ReadWrite Web, or any other site that's covered by Techmeme and can publish news on small startups.  Its a cyclical thing, if Techmeme is failing the community its because the community is failing Techmeme.  If you run a web site dedicated to the tech industry its your job to hunt down interesting startups and make a post that gets other Techmeme covered sites interested. 

The true irony of Techmeme is that its probably the most "Web 2.0" site out there.   Everyone loves to go on and on about the community on Twitter or on FriendFeed or on whatever the A-List decides to love next but all those sites are individual focused.  You have your individual Twitter page, or FriendFeed, or whatever.  Techmeme may be the only site out there that's legitimately community driven.

The Quick Aside Point: When I first saw the quoted post I went in a completely different direction based on this quote...

I’ve been a Techmeme fan for a long time, and I still religiously visit the site daily, although I have found myself using it less and less as writing here at The Inquisitr has allowed me to move away from pleasing someone with a Techmeme headline, to writing about what I love or am interested in, Techmeme headline or not be damned. I’ve also had the privilege of meeting Gave Rivera before and as well as being a great bloke, he’s smart as well…and I should know, I’ve tried multiple times to get a Techmeme clone scripted without any success.

I'm not sure it justifies its own post but I did want to point out how amazing it is that Techmeme has persisted through all the other tech industry fads.  It has lived through Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, et al. and is still going strong.  In a community as fickle as tech blogs that's pretty darn amazing. 

The REALLY out there Aside: Wall-E Rocks!  That has nothing to do with the rest of this post but we just got back from it and I felt the need to say it. 

Mark Evans has a blog post today entitled "Why Original Blog Thought is So Difficult".  In the article he essentially concedes that original thought on Techmeme is a problem (to an extent, see below) and then tries to justify why that is.  I don't agree with almost anything he says in the post but its a thoughtful one and I'd suggest everyone take a look.

Here's a quote...

Given Techmeme’s well-deserved reputation as being the place to quickly discover what’s going on in the tech world, Bott’s assessment is blunt, critical, perhaps unfair but not entirely without merit. He’s right; there is an awful lot of blog posts offering little or no insight other than referring to another blog. Rather than adding to the conversation, many of these posts come across as simply noise and bandwagon jumping.

Right off I have to take issue with his assessment.  I love Techmeme, it's in my blogroll, but it is in no way an accurate gauge of "what's going on in the tech world".  It is at best a representation of what a certain crowd (reporters/conference goers) are talking about. 

That's a crowd that misses things far more than it catches them IMHO.  Facebook didn't become a popular blogosphere topic until YEARS after it had taken hold.  I got more out of talking to friends in college than I did out of the blog crowd.  On the corporate side, Microsoft released brand new versions of its Server OS and its Developer Platform in February (both of which are still used in the majority of companies) and there was barely a peep on Techmeme (one article about Hyper-V which never made it near the top and scrolled off by mid-day).  Again, I got more out of talking to corporate types than I did from the blogs. 

Beyond that Techmeme elevates non-news over actual news.  For an example look no further than the constant coverage of a possible merger between Yahoo and Microsoft.  I can sum up what we know about that merger in one paragraph yet it has been the lead topic on Techmeme countless times.  While back on the Windows 2008 example its release (news that matters to the tech industry) got buried by the only lead Microsoft story on Techmeme that day which was how the EU had fined Microsoft (gossipy news that couldn't matter less to the tech industry)

Again, I love Techmeme but it isn't an accurate gauge of the tech industry. 

Getting back to Mr Evans' post he makes several points that essentially boil down to "Bloggers are forced to post unoriginal thoughts by circumstance" (major paraphrase there, take with a grain of salt). 

Here's a quote that sums up the gist of those points...

1. Writing original thought-provoking blog content is a challenge. It takes time, thought and effort. The problem, however, is many bloggers are often short of time, which means it is difficult to come up with insightful thoughts. As Louis Gray talked about in a recent post, many bloggers are time-strapped what with blogging and being on other social/content vehicles such as Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, RSS readers, etc. If you’re doing all that, when do you have time to think Big Thoughts?

The above point assumes that the failing is on the part of the bloggers.  It would certainly be nice if bloggers didn't make "me too" posts but in the end the failing isn't theirs for making them but Techmeme's for publishing them.  The problem is in Techmeme's process.

In my opinion Techmeme has three major problems with its algorithm right now. 

1.  The Echo-Chamber: Techmeme discovers blogs when other blogs that Gabe Rivera manually seeded in link to them.  The problem is, despite what bloggers might say, they rarely link to people they don't almost completely agree with. 

So, to give an example,  you are never going to get someone who thinks social networking is all hype on Techmeme because that crowd is too enamored with the idea to give credence to someone who doesn't buy into it. 

2.  Barrier to Entry: This is something that is very prominent in the music industry but is just becoming more prominent in the blogosphere.  It essentially boils down to this..."people suck up to the big fish even if the big fish aren't producing the best content". 

So, for example, someone might read 10 posts on a topic better than what someone like Scoble wrote but will link to Scoble out of self interest (no offense to Scoble).  They want his trackbacks and they want his attention so they go for him and block out new talent in the process.

3.  Original News vs. Commentary posters:  Techmeme doesn't seem to differentiate between original news sources and commentary sources.  These are two vastly different types of post and they come from different types of site.  Sites that "break news" get so much weight on Techmeme that it gives you a lot of links that essentially repeat each other (because they are all news sources "breaking" the same news).

This post has already gone on too long but this is a pretty ripe topic so you can expect me to return to it some day soon.  Just to repeat, what Gabe Rivera has done with Techmeme is truly amazing.  I would never dispute that.  But that doesn't mean that the idea is "there yet" as far as maximum usefulness.  Getting to that point is a topic that deserves more discussion.

Meme trackers are something that I have a huge amount of interest in so when I read about a new one called Blogcosm (courtesy of Mathew Ingram) I ran over to check it out.  I actually thought Mr. Ingram was being too hard on the site…that is…until I saw the site myself.  Having actually taken a look I have to say that, in my opinion, this site is just flat out unusable.   I’m honestly not even entirely sure what it does or why I would consider it useful.  It certainly doesn’t appear to be a meme tracker.  Worse though is the fact that the terrible UI design doesn’t give any hint as to what the site’s intended purpose is.  The about page says… 

We're building a reference site about blogging and the blogosphere, one day at a time. 

What?!?  What does that mean?  Sound like it’s a wiki though clearly that isn’t what it is. 

Well, I’d hoped this would segway into a more substantial post about meme trackers but as I’m sure many new bloggers have found sometimes posts don’t go where you expect them to.   Expect a meme trackers post at some point in the future I guess…

Addendum: Scott Lawton, founder of Blogcosm, posted a response to the blog posts generated by his initial interview.  Here’s an exceprt…

But Blogcosm is neither a search engine nor a "meme tracker". We're not a new challenge for Techmeme -- I think people may have read a bit too much between the lines. Initially I thought the title was just intentionally provocative. That may play a role, but perhaps the key word is actually "parse". Our approach to analyzing blogs is different than anything we've seen. (There's no shortage of interesting software opportunities; I've never been one to create "me too" products or sites.) Because we tackle fewer blogs, we can afford to provide more information about each. Marshall's post hit Techmeme -- our first bit of blog fame. Fame is fleeting.... That's ok, we're hard at work on gathering and organizing more data, and presenting it in ways that we think people will find useful. We've only just begun.