How do I get my blog to show up?
To the majority of my readers who aren't publishers, please excuse the interruption. — Selectivity is important for the four sites I run, namely Techmeme, memeorandum, WeSmirch, and Ballbug. Thousands of items are published to the web each day so the trick …
Context & Ripple Effects
Gabe Rivera's four-site aggregation operation — Techmeme, memeorandum, WeSmirch, and Ballbug — has been under competitive pressure since the Blogniscient challenge in late 2005, and his February 2006 interview with Don Dodge framed selectivity as the core of the product. This post is the publisher-facing corollary: with thousands of items published daily, Rivera is explaining to bloggers what actually gets an item past the filter.
The audience split in the post matters — he addresses readers who aren't publishers separately, acknowledging that his sites have become infrastructure that bloggers actively try to get into rather than just read.
First-order effects
- Bloggers now have a stated set of criteria from the operator himself for inclusion across all four sites, turning what was opaque editorial filtering into something publishers can optimize against.
Second-order effects
- Rival blog news services face pressure to articulate their own selection logic or publish transparency of their own, since discoverability advice from one aggregator shifts where writers aim their output.
Third-order effects
- If algorithmic selectors become the main route to tech-news attention, a small number of curation operators effectively set which voices get amplified — gatekeeping power concentrated in ranking choices rather than mastheads.
The trend: Blog discovery is consolidating around a handful of automated editors whose selection criteria are becoming public playbooks that publishers write for.