Ed Bott is right Techmeme is full of drivel

Another great post started from a tweet.  Gabe Rivera posted a link to Ed Bott’s column ranting on the plethora of “me too” posts on Techmeme.  The mindless recitation of what other people wrote without adding to the discussion.

And Ed is right.

Techmeme is the Short Attention Span Theater of the blogosphere. It’s an echo chamber. It encourages reactive, uncritical thinking. The blogswarm gets outraged by whatever they see on Techmeme, they write down whatever pops into their heads (without checking any facts and in most cases without even following the links), and then moves on to the next topic. A “discussion” lasts 24 hours.

Techmeme is a template for a gazillion me-too bloggers who manage to write a dozen posts a day without ever expressing an original thought. That, depressingly, appears to be a successful business model, at least for now.

I could make a lot of money if I followed that same business model. But as those who visit here regularly have probably noticed, that’s not my style. It’s rare if I write 10 posts a week at this site and ZDNet combined. Source: What’s wrong with the blogosphere, part 1 | Ed Bott’s Windows Expertise |

And he’s wrong.

Yes, I blog for a living.  Okay blogging isn’t my whole living, My living depends on blogging since I’m responsible for training the 200+ bloggers at b5.  So I work with a lot of people who do crank out a lot of posts a day.

And Ed is right on the money with a lot of the posts written by folks who aren’t adding anything to the conversation about a topic.  I’ve been pretty disgusted about this in the past, until I figured out, I don’t have to read all the posts, I just read the ones from people who I know write the “good stuff”.

Techmeme is what it is.  I check it often to see what is going on.  I look for the breaking news and if there are any posts worth reading.

Ed, I don’t know if you could make a lot of money doing this.  No offence, but it’s harder than it looks.  I used to crank out 20+ posts a day over several blogs.  It’s not all that fun sometimes.  Not to mention the “me too” posts don’t get a lot of repeat traffic.  It takes passion, originality, and guts to get traffic and visitors enough to earn a decent living from blogging.

I know I can’t always pull off a great post that I can sit back and say “wow, that rocks”.  But, I keep reading, I keep trying, and I keep posting.

And I keep reading Techmeme.  Thanks Gabe.