Why we all overestimate Techmeme's influence
A lot of noise was made last week with the launch of the Techmeme leaderboard - a list of technology centurions on the popular technology news aggregator, built by Gabe Rivera (here's an interview with Gabe by Don Dodge.
Context & Ripple Effects
Techmeme's leaderboard of its top 100 sources went live on October 1, re-ranking sites every 20 minutes based on headline space over the prior month — a move framed at launch as an assault on Technorati's last stronghold. Reception split immediately: some called the Leaderboard the dumbest idea ever, while Don Dodge's interview with founder Gabe Rivera supplied the official rationale.
A week on, the Guardian attacks the premise rather than the feature, arguing the aggregator's grip on tech conversation is overstated. That echoes a March 2007 critique of the Techmeme pile-on, where everyone ends up writing about the same topics simultaneously, while Nick Carr's Rough Type confession of being a 'Techmeme junkie' shows how far the debate travelled beyond one blog.
First-order effects
- Ranked publishers now carry a public, hourly-updated status score, turning Techmeme's editorial weighting into a visible league table that editors and PR can chase.
- Rivera faces a reputational fight over what the metric actually measures: the Guardian's argument implies the leaderboard quantifies attention within a small insider circle, not industry-wide influence.
Second-order effects
- Technorati's authority rankings gain a direct substitute built on real news placement rather than inbound links, pressuring the older ranking service where it was strongest.
- Writers optimizing for leaderboard space converge on identical stories, amplifying the pile-on dynamic critics had already flagged earlier in 2007.
Third-order effects
- If algorithmic leaderboards become tech media's status currency, the benchmark itself starts steering coverage — whoever computes the ranking shapes what gets written.
- Aggregators shift from passive mirrors of the conversation to agenda-setting institutions, with the ranking layer rather than any individual outlet holding durable power.
The trend: News aggregation is evolving from passive mirroring into ranked status systems, where publishing the benchmark becomes a form of market power in its own right.