It’s interesting to see the flurry of commentary on techmeme itself about the appeal of the techmeme leaderboard despite reports of the limited ability of techmeme to drive traffic, and, in general, the low traffic impact of many highly touted blogs and other internet sites.
There are a number of factors at work, but one of them is simple: bestseller lists have an enduring appeal, regardless of their validity. People’s 50 most beautiful? Are they really? The NY Times Bestseller List? Where exactly do those lists come from, especially in the age of vanishing independent booksellers? The Dow Jones Industrial Average? Tell me again just why those 30 stocks matter?
A big part of this phenomenon is in what George Soros calls reflexive knowledge, things that are neither true nor false, but true or false to the extent to which people believe in them and find them useful. Soros points out in The Open Society that many of the most interesting phenomena in society have this characteristic: markets, politics, and much of history.
And there’s the curious fact that bestseller lists of all kinds tend to be self-reinforcing. Once someone’s on the list, they will tend to stay on the list because more people see them there. (And it strikes me that because of the way Techmeme works, as a kind of time-bound spider, one of the ways to make sure you stay on the leaderboard is, well, to comment on stories while they are on the front page of Techmeme. In fact, this post is the beginning of my experiment to see if that is true. :-)
All that being said, I do think that Techmeme is a great news source — a quick impression of what’s on the blogosphere’s mind. I don’t need to follow the links to get value out of it, any more than I need to go to Yahoo! Finance for more detail every time I see a stock ticker symbol and price. The headline is the news. (Put Techmeme into the lifestreaming category rather than referrer category if you want.)
P.S. With regard to referrer impact, we’ve found that the only site that drives book sales as a result of reviews is slashdot. I know we once published some stats comparing the effect of slashdot reviews to the NYT but I can’t find it right now.