One of the favorite bitchmeme’s on Techmeme, the popular blog and news headline site that keeps track of the most talked-about tech stories on the Web, is that it is dominated by A-list blogs and news sites with full-time writing staffs. Because of this professionalization of the blogosphere, the argument goes, lone bloggers are being pushed out of the conversation. TechCrunch is sometimes carted out as Exhibit A in this argument, which is why I was glad to see the chart above from the StatBot. It shows the distribution of headlines on Techmeme by rank on the Techmeme Leaderboard.

While about a 30 percent of the headlines are hogged by the top ten sources on the Techmeme Leaderboard (see table at left), another full third come from blogs and sites that don’t even rank in the top 100. That means that if you have something interesting to say, it doesn’t matter who you are, other blogs will find you and link to you. Right now that would include the post on Statbot, which is written by a self described “17-year-old wannabe geek from India” named Yuvi. Welcome to the conversation, Yuvi. A sure-fire way to get on Techmeme is to . . . write about Techmeme. But there are plenty of other ways to get there as well.

Personally, I think the distribution shown in the graph is what makes Techmeme so compelling. It always includes a pretty steady list of trusted sources, but mixed in with those are plenty of wild cards who can, in turn, become dominant voices in their own right. That’s how I like my news: a third from relatively well-known sources, a third from sources that are a complete surprise, and the rest to be from somewhere in between.

See the top individual bloggers by the TechMeme Leaderboard as well.

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We’ve been analyzing historical TechMeme data to dig a little deeper than the leaderboard information on the site that shows top blogs over the trailing 30 days. Mark McGranaghan and I are slicing the data in a number of ways and will publish in shortly on CrunchBase.

For now we thought we’d show a teaser - below are the top 100 tech bloggers/authors, based on the total number of headlines they have had on TechMeme from January 1, 2008 to today. The data isn’t 100% perfect as we’ve been grabbing it only once per hour, so a headline that was up for less than one hour may not be counted. But in terms of tracking the most popular bloggers, the data is meaningful. Since a lot of the top leaderboard blogs are multi-author, this helps to shake out who’s actually writing the popular stories.

Full list is below:

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There’s been much discussion lately around ways to follow and keep up with friends and the latest news in the tech world. There are plenty of new startups looking to make life easier; many have merit, but here’s a few tips to help you know what’s going on.

A Good FeedReader

Many consider that understanding and subscribing to feeds is a given, but the reality is that terms like RSS, Atom, and even Feeds are foreign to most people. The starting point is always a good feedreader. My personal choice is Google Reader, but I was a Bloglines fan for many years and they’ve been implementing a lot of extra features, so ultimately pick between the two. Once you’ve picked a FeedReader you should naturally subscribe to TechCrunch here. One source is never enough, so subscribe to ReadWriteWeb, GigaOm and VentureBeat as well.

A Start Page

After TechCrunch naturally, I start my mornings on TechMeme. Gabe Rivera’s site is a favorite and despite some criticism elsewhere continues to accurately track the big stories in the tech blogosphere, and that includes general tech away from the stuff we cover on TechCrunch.

Twitter

Twitter I’m told is still an acquired taste, but I’m finding more and more that I pick up breaking stories first on Twitter. Twitter is only as good as the network you link in to; so it can be a bit hard (or barren) at first. The key is to give it time, and add friends.

Overall

If you want a full picture of our industry and space there are existing tools that allow you to do it well, complete with interaction. There’s a lot of noise out there, at times too much noise, but the tools listed can help you keep on top of it.

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Digg competitor Mixx continues to impress us with new features (although the exodus of Digg users to them may have been short lived).

A new feature launches this week on Mixx called Related Items. It solves a common problem found on Digg and other sites where multiple articles on the same story compete with each other to get to the home page. One person may submit a story from USAToday. Another may submit basically the same story but from the Washington Post. Those stories are tracked separately on Digg, and votes are split between them as users discover them. The result is that the story takes longer to get to the home page than it otherwise should. Or worse, both make it and the story is duplicated. Digg catches duplicate submission for the exact same link, but they are unable to determine if stores are related.

The Related Items feature on Mixx flags a submission when it thinks that a story is similar. A message appears that says “We may already have this story! Or at least one startling similar. Take a look at the stories below.” The user submitting the related story can then choose to submit it anyway, or add it as a related item to the previous submission.

There is a benefit to the submitter in adding the story to the previous submission because the new story will be added, too (and traffic will flow). Users venefit because they get more information and perspectives on the story.

The clustering that will occur from this will very much resemble TechMeme, which is a great way to quickly find multiple perspectives on the news.

Mixx, which is backed by Intersouth Partners and the LA Times, is still a tiny blip compared to competitors like Digg and Reddit. Comscore says Digg has 12 million unique monthly visitors, compared to about a million on Reddit. Mixx? They’ve got just 45,000. That’s probably a low count, since newer and smaller sites are much harder for Comscore to measure. but they have a long, long way to go before they are even no. 2 in this market. If they keep launching new features like this, though, I think they have a chance at success.

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Digg competitor Mixx continues to impress us with new features (although the exodus of Digg users to them may have been short lived).

A new feature launches this week on Mixx called Related Items. It solves a common problem found on Digg and other sites where multiple articles on the same story compete with each other to get to the home page. One person may submit a story from USAToday. Another may submit basically the same story but from the Washington Post. Those stories are tracked separately on Digg, and votes are split between them as users discover them. The result is that the story takes longer to get to the home page than it otherwise should. Or worse, both make it and the story is duplicated. Digg catches duplicate submission for the exact same link, but they are unable to determine if stores are related.

The Related Items feature on Mixx flags a submission when it thinks that a story is similar. A message appears that says “We may already have this story! Or at least one startling similar. Take a look at the stories below.” The user submitting the related story can then choose to submit it anyway, or add it as a related item to the previous submission. Digg also flags stories that may be similar to other submissions, but does not offer the ability to cluster the new story to the old ones.

There is a benefit to the submitter in adding the story to the previous submission because the new story will be added, too (and traffic will flow). Users benefit because they get more information and perspectives on the story. Here’s a screen shot of how the clustering will look (click for bigger view):

The clustering that will occur from this will very much resemble TechMeme, which is a great way to quickly find multiple perspectives on the news.

Mixx, which is backed by Intersouth Partners and the LA Times, is still a tiny blip compared to competitors like Digg and Reddit. Comscore says Digg has 12 million unique monthly visitors, compared to about a million on Reddit. Mixx? They’ve got just 45,000. That’s probably a low count, since newer and smaller sites are much harder for Comscore to measure. but they have a long, long way to go before they are even no. 2 in this market.

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The last time I was in the Valley I spent a decent 90 minutes catching up with Techmeme’s Gabe Rivera on Michael’s lounge (sorry, couch). As I do every time I catch up with Gabe, I endeavored to get him to spill the secrets of Techmeme’s algorithm, then shortly there after I offered him money to license the script (having failed on three previous attempts to get someone on Scriptlance to design me a clone). As usual I failed on both accounts, but there was a third request and Gabe was listening.

Like many I’m addicted to Techmeme and more recently Twitter, and to date Techmeme + Twitter hasn’t met my expectations. Techmeme’s feed, which is then fed into Twitter, only offers “important” stories, and hence the only way to see breaking stories on Techmeme has been to visit the page itself and constantly refresh it. As of today, Gabe is now offering “Firehose” feeds that provide any story attaining headline status on Techmeme (which excludes “Discussion” links) within 5 minutes, either by RSS and/ or Twitter. RSS feed here and Twitter account here.

The down side is that the page view number for Techmeme is about to take a hit, but conversely Techmeme fans will welcome this additional functionality. Thanks Gabe.

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On the evening of March 6, 2008 I’ll be moderating a Churchill Club panel discussion in San Francisco on “Bootstrapping As A Start-Up.” Participants include Sean Byrnes (CEO Flurry), Craig Newmark (Founder Craigslist), Gabe Rivera (Founder TechMeme), and Stephen Weir (CEO MadeIt). The discussion will be around starting and growing a startup without outside funding.

This is a very small event - just 30 attendees total (hopefully they’ll video so that more people can watch it afterwards). The tickets are now gone - but the last five have been reserved for TechCrunch readers (and are free). If you want to go, please leave a comment below telling us why you think you would benefit from the event or have something interesting to contribute. Also, given that there are so few seats available, please don’t ask for a ticket unless you are sure you can attend. I’ll choose five in 24 hours.

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Amit Agarwal at Labnol created a video that shows an image of the TechMeme home page taken page every five minutes. 500 screen shots total are shown over a fifty hour period, sped up so that it all fits in a 50-second video. See how headlines develop, grow and eventually shrink over time. A high res version is here.

TechMeme

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This will be the third annual post on “Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without.” The first post, for 2006, is here. The 2007 post, written a year ago, is here.

This is a list of the products I tend to use daily. Some are for work (Wordpress, Delicious, Google Docs, etc.), some are for fun (Amazon Music, Amie Street, etc), and some are useful for both (Digg, Skype, YouTube, etc.). But I use most of them every day, or nearly every day, and I would not be as productive or happy without all of them.

The list changes a bit from year to year, and is also getting longer (see chart). Five products have been favorites all three years (Flickr, Netvibes, TechMeme, Skype, Wordpress). Five more were favorites last year and this year, but not in 2006 (1-800-Free-411, Amie Street, Digg, Gmail, YouTube). Two were off the list last year but are back now (Delicious, Technorati). And there are seven new products on the list (Amazon MP3 Store, Facebook, Firefox, Google Reader, TripIt, Twitter, Zoho). Some of my picks might be surprising, like Firefox just being added to the list this year (I used Flock previously and was unhappy with Firefox on the Mac, but the 3.0 beta is performing very well). Some of these are close calls (I love Pageflakes, but just not enough to fully switch from Netvibes, for example). And there are a bunch of startups that didn’t make the list to keep it short. I’ve put a few “almosts” at the end to round out the list, as well as a couple of favorite gadgets.

Here’s the current list, in alphabetical order, of products I use every day and couldn’t live without:

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We’ve praised new hosted forum startup Tangler on a number of occasions - most recently calling it the bleeding edge in new discussion board/forum startups.

Apparently someone else likes it too. Someone in Turkey is willing to pay up to $1,500 to anyone who can “clone Tangler.” But don’t go too far - the listing also states “do not steal tangler.com images and do not violate copyrights. The clone should have the same functions, but the design should look different.”

Two bids have been placed already, one for just $1,000. Of course, building a scalable forum platform that allows syncronous and asyncronous messaging via a javascript interface may require more of an investment than $1,000 or so. But hey, why not try.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen something like this. Someone tried to buy a Techmeme clone for just $500 in 2006, and a fresher listing shows a $300 request for the same thing.

To whoever wins the business - my recommendation is to ask for the money up front, because it’s very unlikely you’re going to have a happy customer when you hand over a week or two of work on your Tangler or TechMeme clone.

Tangler

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Can’t see the video? Click here