Techmeme Leaderboard is live
The Techmeme Leaderboard, that much-leaked list of Techmeme's top 100 sources, including blogs, non-blogs, and everything in between, is now up. It ranks sites, every 20 minutes, simply by the amount of headline space they've occupied on Techmeme over the past month.
Context & Ripple Effects
Earlier today, TechCrunch previewed the Leaderboard launch as an attack on Technorati's last stronghold — the blog-directory's authority rankings — and the product is now live: Techmeme ranks its top 100 sources every 20 minutes purely by the headline space they have occupied on Techmeme over the past month.
The story traveled fast and wide on day one, picked up by TechCrunch, Scripting News, Publishing 2.0, Scobleizer, and Read/WriteWeb, and the framing split immediately: Publishing 2.0 read the top 100 as dominated by media companies rather than blogs, while Scobleizer asked whether the list heralds the death of blogging. That debate lands against months of criticism of Techmeme's pile-on effect, where outlets converge on the same stories simultaneously — a columnist flagged exactly that back in March 2007.
First-order effects
- The 100 ranked sources gain a continuously updated public measure of their Techmeme footprint — for big blogs and mainstream outlets alike, headline placement on Techmeme is now an auditable, month-long score.
- Technorati faces its most direct competitive threat yet: Techmeme's leaderboard measures real distribution through an aggregator, not inbound links counted by a directory.
Second-order effects
- Sites near the top 100 boundary gain an incentive to optimize headlines and timing for Techmeme pickup, since the ranking is recomputed every 20 minutes from visible headline space.
- If the list skews toward established media companies, as Publishing 2.0 observed at launch, independent bloggers face a status contest where aggregator exposure — not the blogroll — decides who counts as a top source.
Third-order effects
- Aggregator-computed rankings are positioning themselves as the tech industry's de facto authority benchmark, displacing self-declared directories like Technorati and making curation algorithms, not communities, the arbiters of which outlets matter — a shift whose gaming dynamics echo the pile-on criticism Techmeme has drawn all year.
The trend: Influence measurement in tech media is migrating from link-counting directories to algorithmic aggregators, whose own traffic patterns become the benchmark everyone optimizes against.