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.

Post from: EveryJoe

Ed Bott is right Techmeme is full of drivel

Best bootstrapped startup: Techmeme.
Founded and developed solely by Gabe Rivera, Techmeme serves as the front page of the tech blogosphere. The site’s advanced algorithms identify the day’s top stories by making sense of conversations across the web’s best blogs.

Best Startup CEO: Toni Schneider (Automattic)

Schnieder has lead the company from its roots as a open source alternative to Movable Type into a multi-million dollar enterprise that saves the world from blog spam and offers a free hosted blogging solution that competes with Google’s Blogger.

Most likely to succeed: Automattic (WordPress)

The open source blogging platform that powers the long tale and turned into a multi-million dollar spam fighting and hosted blogging service.

Best use of viral marketing: StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon’s service lets users bookmark and discover new sites they love. With only a $1.5 million investment in 2005, StumbleUpon gew to over 4 million Stumblers and was bought by eBay in 2007 for $75 million Source: 2007 Crunchies: The Winners

Gabe Rivera has done something great with Techmeme.  It might not be perfect, even Gabe sees that, but it is my source for finding the best conversations on the hot topics.  I generally know what the hot topic du jour is, but it’s who is chiming in and saying what that I use Techmeme for.

Automattic, well I’m a huge fan.  Congrats to all my friends as Automattic, Lloyd, Matt, Donncha, and especially Toni for pulling in the Best Startup CEO award!

StumbleUpon, before it was scooped up by eBay, was based in Calgary, so I have to give props to them.

With this kind of recognition, I wonder what is coming up for both Techmeme and Automattic.  Sure I could guess, but what fun would that be?  I’ll just have to see if I can dig up some tips.  Maybe DEMO in a couple weeks will give me some ideas.

Photo of Mike Arrington, Toni, and Matt by Scott Beale

Post from: EveryJoe

Congrats to all the Crunchies winners, but especially Techmeme, StumbleUpon, Automattic, & Toni Schneider