Techmeme Launches Techmeme Leaderboard

Posted on October 1, 2007

There's another blog a-list for people to observe and blog about. Techmeme has launched a Top 100 ranking of the blogs with the most presence on the Techmeme memetracker. It is called the Techmeme Leaderboard. It includes newspaper, magazine and broadcast news websites as well as blogs.

A source's presence is the probability that a random Techmeme headline at a random time over the past month was published by that source. The Leaderboard ranks sources by presence. What is a source? Sidestepping knotty issues of ownership and affiliation, sources are simply identified by the branding a publisher chooses. So blogs are generally distinct sources from their parent site. Thus, Saul Hansell writes for two different sources: Bits (the NYT blog), and the New York Times proper, even though the New York Times Company publishes both. The same goes for CrunchGear and TechCrunch and other blogs contained in blog "networks".

Here is how presence is defined on the Techmeme Leaderboard.

Sources are ranked by Presence, the percentage of headline space a source occupies over the 30-day period. "Discussion" links are not taken in to consideration here - only full headlines are counted.

Unlike Technorati's list of the most popular blogs this list from Techmeme is primarily tech blogs because Techmeme covers technology news. Techmeme's Leaderboard doesn't attack Technorati's "last stronghold" like TechCrunch argues it does. The Techmeme list is about technology weblogs and websites. Technorati's list is an overall ranking of all kinds of blogs. These two a-lists aren't even measuring the same content and they are measuring them in different ways.

Update: Webomatica and SmoothSpan would like to see the blogs beyond #100 - that would be a good addition to both the Technorati #100 and the Techmeme Leaderboard. Show us the rest of the tail.