The technology blogosphere is like a giant dog that is forever chasing its tail - except when it stops to lick its netherparts.
This quote captures the fizzy nothingness that is the Techmeme Leaderboard perfectly.
By ranking blogs on links, not traffic, it reinforces the founding myth of Technorati: It’s not who reads you, it’s who blogs you that matters. And by limiting itself to tech blogs, Techmeme confirms most tech bloggers’ sheltered worldview. Why pay attention to the world outside, or cater to mainstream readers’ interests? The only people worth caring about are the ones already on your blogroll.
Predictably, Dave Winer wants to track the changes to the leaderboard somehow:
A pragmatic question for people who want to follow the TechMeme LeaderBoard — it’s clearly not practical to look at it as frequently as it could change, every 20 minutes.
So what kind of tool do we need to tell us about change? Email notification? An RSS feed for each site? I’m interested in knowing what people think.
For god’s sake, let it go.
Update 2007-10-06: Dave fell out of love fast this time.