A new top 100?
Like almost everyone else, I keep track of who's pointing to me in Technorati, a service that was created in a Thanksgiving programming binge by David Sifry, based on the output of (my own labor of love) weblogs.com. — Technorati grew to become a blog search engine …
Context & Ripple Effects
For two years the Technorati 100 has been the de facto league table of the blogosphere, built on David Sifry's link-counting engine that itself grew out of Dave Winer's weblogs.com ping service. Read/WriteWeb spent March 2007 probing both what made the list hot and Technorati's opportunities and exit options, framing the ranking as the company's most defensible asset.
On the same day this post appears, Gabe Rivera's Techmeme Leaderboard goes live — TechCrunch frames it explicitly as an attack on Technorati's last stronghold, and Scobleizer's pickup asks whether the list heralds the death of blogging. Winer, watching his own inbound links on Technorati, is asking whether a new top 100 is about to be crowned by an editor-curated aggregator rather than a link counter.
First-order effects
- Bloggers who track their standing through Technorati now have a rival scoreboard: the Techmeme Leaderboard ranks sources by appearance on a human-edited news page, so the same day it launches, every A-list blog's rank is suddenly contested between two methodologies.
- Technorati's top-100 franchise — the asset Read/WriteWeb identified as central to its exit options — loses its monopoly status the moment a credible alternative list exists.
Second-order effects
- Blogs near the top of either list gain a bargaining chip for ads and syndication, but only if they can hold placement under Techmeme's editorial selection as well as Technorati's link math — pushing high-traffic bloggers to optimize for aggregator visibility, not just inbound links.
- Other aggregators and ranking services face pressure to publish their own leaderboards or concede the 'who matters in blogging' question to whoever ships a list first.
Third-order effects
- If curation-based rankings outcompete link-counting, blog authority consolidates around a small set of human-edited aggregators — a structural shift from the open, distributed weblogs.com-era model Winer built toward gatekept attention markets.
- The episode previews a recurring pattern in web media: measurement itself becomes the contested product layer, and whoever owns the leaderboard shapes which publishers survive.
The trend: Blog authority is migrating from algorithmic link-counting services like Technorati toward human-curated aggregators like Techmeme, with each new leaderboard redefining who counts as a top publisher.