Techmeme's biggest stories of 2011, literally, as measured by height
One of the best things about Techmeme is how “huge” or “big” stories can literally be that: conveyed through a stack of headlines several times taller than your screen size. (Unless you hate this …
Context & Ripple Effects
Techmeme has turned year-end retrospectives into a tradition: a chronological top-50 recap closed out 2008, and the biggest stories of 2010 got the same treatment a year ago. What changes this time is the yardstick — instead of ranking events, the site measures each story by the literal height of its stacked headlines, a joke that only works because the aggregator's front page really does pile duplicate coverage into towers.
The piece lands in a year when Techmeme's curation was itself contested ground: publishers spent October 2011 publicly pressing the site on why some outlets get linked for a story and others don't, tweets became eligible as headlines in January 2011, and skeptics had argued since the 2007 influence debate that the site's agenda-setting power was overstated. A recap that makes 'bigness' visible is also a quiet argument for that power.
First-order effects
- Outlets whose headlines anchor the tallest stacks end the year with a visible badge of agenda-setting status — meaningful currency in a period when publishers were openly disputing Techmeme's linking choices.
Second-order effects
- The height ranking gives editors one more Techmeme-specific scorecard to optimize for, stacking on top of the Leaderboard the site launched in 2007 and reinforcing the incentive to chase aggregator pickup.
Third-order effects
- If annual recaps keep framing Techmeme's curation as the record of the year, the aggregator's editorial judgments harden into the de facto history of tech news — precisely the consolidation of influence its critics flagged back in 2007.
The trend: Tech news is increasingly measured by a single curator's own metrics, with Techmeme's year-end scorecards doubling as the industry's self-assessment.