Techmeme: A Not-Quite Retraction

By Ian, on October 30th, 2008

Gabe Rivera, the creator of Techmeme, is either a PR genius or so nice that I am flummoxed. After my last post, trashing his service, he tweeted:

Techmeme readers overlooking TheReg & Guardian’s homepages should know what they’re missing, says @iandelaney: http://bit.ly/19rsap I agree.

And I guess that this is why I owe a not-quite retraction. Techmeme is what it is. It gathers the memes (and in this case, that simply means ‘talking points’) on technology-related blogs.

Things it is not:

A news source;
A journalistic endeavour of any kind.

It’s an algorithm, partially hand-tinkered, I believe, that catches what tech bloggers are talking about. If some nonsense happens to excite that portion of the blogosphere then it will show up. That isn’t the site’s fault. It’s our fault. Techmeme, for tech bloggers, is a mirror. And if we don’t like what we see in the mirror, we shouldn’t blame that piece of silvered glass.

When I said that Techmeme was a ‘useless clusterfuck’, what I really should have said was that the bulk of tech blogging, as perceived through Techmeme, is a useless clusterfuck. If I were Gabe, I would despair.

But at the same time, I get it. It’s frankly easier for bloggers to get worked up and mouth-off about some not-yet-confirmed yet-possibly-possible feature on Google than it is for them to comment on the implications of SAP’s agreement with P&G, the complexities of which are immense.

I can understand that.

Don’t expect the original, the useful, the important or the unpopular news to appear on Techmeme. Expect the ‘talking points’. A bit like when you walk into the office wanting to discuss the great documentary that was on last night, but all anyone wants to talk about is the X-Factor.