My friend Robert Scoble put up a couple of Seesmic videos on how to reverse-engineer Techmeme. For anyone who doesn’t know, Techmeme is a fringe site that aggregates technology news from blogs. The more a story is talked about, the more likely it will appear on Techmeme. And the more authoritative the people talking about the story, the higher they will appear on the Techmeme home page. I watch both videos in their entirety, and enjoyed them. The thing I just am still missing is why it’s important to be on Techmeme.

Gear Live network sites have been on Techmeme quite a few times. We didn’t really see any significant boost in traffic or anything else. To some people, it’s almost as if it’s a game in and of itself - “I wanna be on the top of Techmeme!”. Me? I’d rather be the top Google search result for that story. Techmeme is so temporary. The other thing that gets me is the weight put on sites as far as how authoritative they are is done by a human being, Gabe Riviera. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against Gabe at all. I’ve met him and he seems to be a cool guy. However, the way sites/bloggers are ranked means that people are going to get missed.

There very well could be someone who writes better than, say, Mike Arrington, about a certain topic. But until Gabe hears of that person, Mike is still considered number one? It would seem to me that Techmeme should have a paid staff of people who rate and rank things, almost Mahalo-style. A group of 20 people is way more efficient (but still not efficient enough) than one guy doing the ranking. You can say that the larger group of people that Gabe uses is the bloggers who are regularly featured on Techmeme - but really, if that is your opinion, you just aren’t realizing how much of an echo chamber the blogosphere has become.

In any event, I’d still recommend checking out Robert’s videos if only to learn how algorithms work.