But seriously, Gabe Rivera announced said Leaderboard with an explanation that kind of reminded me of Technorati's Top 100, and then Feedster's 500 (what happened to Feedster anyway??)....
Gabe's pulling no punches, however, and being quite open about how Techmeme and the Leaderboard are biased:
I wish it were obvious, but there's no such thing as an unbiased automated news site (or search engine for that matter). Automation doesn't remove bias, it merely obscures it. The configurations that make Techmeme a tech news site embody some of that bias. Beyond that, headlines are also skewed by Techmeme's emphasis of business news over areas like video game reviews, developer news, gadget arcana, and green tech. Finally, influencers that communicate mainly in links don't figure prominently on Techmeme. Slashdot is widely read, yet absent from the top 100.
The great thing about Gabe's transparency is that there's no way that folks who don't blog about business or tech can bitch and moan about not being aggregated by Techmeme. We *know* that it's rigged. And knowing it's rigged makes it a *tad* easier to digest...
and I say a *tad* because, well, as my friend Jeneane Sessum astutely observes:
I see two things: high profile traditional media outlets and a lot of popular white tech guys. Where are the Michelle Arringtons? The Darla Winers? The Jackie Jarvises? The GigaOphelias? Dude, who moved my uterus?
Good point, Jeneane--although danah's in there, and Kara Swisher (more women in the groupblogs though.) But, you're right too that, aside from this danah and Kara, there probably won't be any of us up there any time soon. (although it's mighty weird to see the Associated Press in there--yeah, your right about meet-the-new-boss-same-as-the-old-boss. Would be nice if the Girls could innovate a tech-based group blog! ha!)
It's not that women aren't good solo bloggers--and not that women *aren't* visible in the blogosphere...we're just not bloggin-a-plenty on tech and business.
In fact, it seems that women have constructed their own (possibly countable) corner of the blogosphere over at BlogHer where there is much discussion about the things lots of women bloggers are into. (the Blogher 100?? I wouldn't make that one either.)
Oh, let's face it Jeneane, there aren't a lot of us kinda geeky types who care about the latest wankings about Facebook or the latest piece of technological kitsch that's going to make a bunch of folks heavy sigh today and cry tomorrow (when their investment goes out the window...See this about Skype.) Lots of women bloggers don't give a darned about what Michael Arrington says because they're more concerned about the babies in their laps or the sturm und drang of their dating lives.
Or food. Lots of women food bloggers, too.
Now, don't get me wrong--I used to write a lot about my own messy relationship sturm und drang until I figured out that there weren't all that many women listening to me--and that I could have more fun (and links and influence, more or less)blogging about guy-type stuff.
And I started getting aggregated by Techmeme :-)
Dan Farber's piece on the Leaderboard relies heavily on something Scoble said about the Leaderboard-- the possible "death" of blogging, and how *everybody* who's *anybody* is going to Twitter....
Well, not really. Sure, there's lots of folks on Twitter. But I'm not on Twitter. Not a lot of the people I know from blogging or other social media hangouts are on Twitter--and for lots of reasons. So, maybe Robert's friends trump my friends for A-listyness--but who knows...
And does it really matter? Is it really all about one's friends and fans and family--or is it all about influence and getting contracts and making the grade to become eligible for BlogAds? These are two different things, really...
Although things have definitely shifted in blogging--and Lisa Williams and I felt the shift. We were talking about it earlier tonight in reference to our own feelings about our blogs. We were both saying how blogging's now part of a larger landscape of "social media." Now there are many ways of reaching out to friends and expressing oneself and one's thoughts. Even the blogosphere itself is more fractured, with a marketing sphere, and a political sphere, and a "mommy sphere, and a tried-and-true tech sphere, and a blogging-for-bucks sphere--and the folks of one sphere often don't meet, greet, nor interact with one another.
As I learned at the last BlogHer conference, you can be an influencer and know tons of people and yet if you're not blogging about your kids, you can be totally anonymous in a roomful of other bloggers...
All depends on the blogger's priorities--and the group to whit she/he is accepted.
An odd statement from Robert, though: [I] noticed that it has very few bloggers on it — I can only see about 12 real blogs on that list.....
Aside from the fact that there are a lot of msm sits, the fact that there are very few solo bloggers is something I noticed about the top of the Technorati Top 100 sometime back--when all of a sudden, Huffington Post, in less than a year, was in the top 10. H.P was *never* a solo blog. And, from that point on, the majority of the "top" blogs of the Top 100 were group blogs (with the exception of the Asian blogs that broke the top 100 in Feb '06--none of the white guys could figure that one out.) Part of that shift had to do with posting frequency--group blogs could churn out more posts than single person blogs, thus generate more links. The great blog BoingBoing was at the top spot for *the longest* time, and it was never a single-person voice-in-the-wilderness blog.
Frankly, since I've been blogging (since November '04--on the shuttered personal blog), it's been darned hard for a single-person voice-in-the-wilderness blog to crack the Technorati Top 100. That was one thing many of us bitched and moaned about because of the whole notion of permalinks being cumulative along with postlinks left us rather screwed. If you started in '04, there was little likelihood that you'd be able to catch up with someone who, say, started in '01.
That is, unless you group-blogged-it, like Huffington...and put out huge press releases...like Huffington...and had all sorts of celebrity-blogger names you could have post to your blog....like Huffington...
So, the blogosphere as some folks knew it, was never really the blogosphere as I knew it. Although I have managed to get my squeaky voice heard out there. And get some decent perks for it. Which I think is pretty darned amazing...
So, I say, good luck with the Leaderboard, Gabe. And who knows..maybe, if I keep this blogging thing up, I just might break this top 100. (but I won't hold my breath on that one...I know better now...)
Update: I forgot to mention that there are *more* lists out there that impact which blogs get traffic and links--two notables from the marketing 'sphere are the AdAge Power 150 and the W List of women bloggers (which is also a meme that started circulating around mid Aug--See Toby Bloomberg's post which is where I found out about it.) There's also 2K Bloggers which made a number of people very upset when it launched (saying it would "game" Technorati--when, in fact, Technorati had already been "gamed" by splogs that ended up adding specious links to already established high-ranking blogs.) Yet the tech 'sphere hardly commented on these. Perhaps this is a symptom that tech is now its own niche in the long tail, and that there's just no way for one standard Top 100 list to rule the entire blogosphere. More on this later.
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