From the Merriam Webster entry:

Main Entry: re·cid·i·vist
Pronunciation: –vist
Function: noun
Etymology: French récidiviste, from récidiver to relapse, from Middle French, from Medieval Latin recidivare, from Latin recidivus recurring, from recidere to fall back, from re– + cadere to fall

Earlier this evening, I made what some might describe as an immoderate comment on Twitter. To whit, when my friend and colleague Mike Butcher said he’d finally been listed on Techmeme, I twitted:

techmeme is a useless clusterfuck. full stop. I say this with my work hat OFF.

I later elaborated, in response to a request for a better alternative from Mike:

@mbites yep — the grdn and times’ media pages. NMA, brandrepublic and (I hope) NMK. Real money; real business; real issues. Fuck that shit

Some other people asked me to explain. So what I meant was ‘fuck that shit’. And when I say ‘fuck that shit’, I mean this. I am taking a random sample of techmeme versus two regular IT titles — the first two that popped into my head — that I don’t care about one way or another. These are screen grabs at the time of writing:

Compared to this:

or even this:

Top stories:

(a) Proctor and Gamble signing with SAP (computing)

(b) Exclusive interview about UK security leaks (register)

© Google possibly maybe interested in OpenID (techmeme)

Here’s a quiz:

- Which of those stories will have most impact on the UK’s economy, and its ability to employ people? (hint: not c)

- Which of these stories is of the greatest interest and importance to UK citizens (hint: not c)

- Which of these stories is based on PR-spin from the company that originated it, and doesn’t actually contain any facts (hint: it’s c)

QED

That’s hardly an exhaustive analysis. But that’s the state of affairs as I write this and almost anytime I look at those three sites.

Oh, I forget, the reason I made the comment in the first place was in response to Mike’s comment that he’d hit Techmeme for the first time. Mike writes the best tech startup blog in the UK. He has done since April 2007 — and has been writing about digital in the UK since forever. But not ‘important’ enough for techmeme, evidently.

Also, the reason for my expression ‘clusterfuck’. Look at this advice from arch-self-promoter Jason Calacanis:

1. Blog intelligently. Think about your post for a day before you hit publish. Do research–do primary research in the real work. Write something with insight, and include links to other folks ideas.

2. Go to 2–3 events or conferences a week.

3. Get a great domain name that is easy to remember and spell (i.e. buzzmachine.com).

4. Go to TechMeme and write an insightful piece daily about one of the top stories.

5. Start emailing other bloggers with feedback on their stories. (don’t beg for links)

6. Be smart.

7. Don’t be an idiot.

That’s it… you’re now A-List.

That’s very good advice, it seems. Write about what everyone else is writing about. Forget about your own identity. Except the way it works out is that any idiot can be an A-lister (as far as techmeme is concerned) by hanging on as many coat-tails as you need to.

Algorithms can only go so far, eh.

I take a similar view myself when it comes to a lot of ‘citizen journalism’, but I’m a bit more hopeful about its future. Yes, it’s easy to write anything you want without much fear of any serious consequence. And yes, it’s currently fairly simple to get pretty wide coverage for this. But the thing is, sites that publish lies will surely lose readers. What’s more, the commenting systems that are so integral to the blog experience allow anyone to correct you instantly and, talking to the authors of a couple of high-profile blogs, people do. And thus the exposure of your mistakes become a permanent part of the site, something most of us want to avoid. This is a good thing, of course, because once bitten, it makes blog authors more careful about what they write. With news voting sites, once you’ve discovered that you ‘dugg’ a story that turned out to be untrue, won’t that make you a little bit more cautious going forward? Similarly, while a lot of mistakes and bad writing appears in Wikipedia, it’s continually being corrected and refined, so that over time it gets better and better.

That’s very different to traditional media, where your editor and subeditor — and hopefully your training and professionalism — will stop you making as many mistakes in the first place. But, on the other hand, the mistakes that do slip through tend to take a long time to be corrected, if at all, and those corrections can quite easily be buried on page 32.

The madness of the masses

You see, the faster the news services the greater the chance of error. Social news sites can beat any traditional news site based on speed–but they are always going to suffer from the madness of the masses. The upside is that social news sites expose misinformation almost as quickly as they disseminate it–will people remember the correction or just the incorrect headline is the rub. Sometimes they will, sometimes they won’t. The masses, and managers, of these sites are going to need to focus on corrections as violently as they do misinformation, or the social news sites will turn into glorified message boards/chat rooms.