In rural France there’s a game that’s played among drunken men. It’s called the Sausage Game. Essentially it’s about seeing who can p**s highest up the wall outside the local bar usually labelled ‘urinale’ after a skinful – you get the picture – Big Swinging Dick and all that. And so it is over at Techmemeorandum…or so it seems.
Techmemeorandum bills itself as the place where the buzz around topics du jour are aggregated so you can see who’s talking about what at any particular point in time. As such, it should be a great resource for finding the best aggregated thinking around a topic. Put simply, it works on the basis of numbers of links between assorted posts around a specific topic.
In theory, this is a self-selecting process. But is it? Vinnie has been concerned about the lack of topics showing up that reflect tech issues impacting business, an area I’ve increasingly felt is badly under-represented on Techmemeorandum. He kindly sent me an email thread where he’d raised the issue with Techmemeorandum’s owner Gabe Rivera. Vinnie’s argument is that the site is skewed heavily in favour of consumer apps whereas the reality is that more than 10x that amount is spent by business every year. True.
Gabe says:
Can you pick three headlines from today about the topics you mentioned that
have been linked by 5 or more people? (Use technorati or whatever as need.)
Or how about linked by just 3 bloggers?My site in fact has been monitoring your blog for a while. I added it
specifically. But that alone won’t cause your posts to appear. Your posts
(or posts from similar bloggers) need to have their stuff discussed and
linked to.
errr…ok…so…I know there are plenty of people that link to Vinnie, I’ve got a decent subscription list so people must be linking here and my hit rate is climbing nicely. Vinnie appears in the US national tech and other press. I do stuff that hits mainstream media. As do others. Nick Carr is one such, John Battelle is another. James Governor is yet another. Carr and Battelle lead certain debates yet Techmemeorandum’s coverage of their input is sporadic. Europe is massively under represented. OK – not so many dealing with tech issues ‘over here.’
So what have we got here? Robert Scoble - chief fog horn for Microsoft – appears regularly. Understandable. But it’s not that simple. In a heated exchange at Search Camps, Scoble said: “The world is following me.” No Robert, the world doesn’t follow you and he already knows that. Techmemeorandum follows you.
To be perfectly frank, the amount of crap I see coming from Scoble and Dave Winer (who doesn’t allow people to link to him) – two of the biggest foghorns in the blogosphere ( or is it blogocircles?), I sometimes wonder how they sustain traffic. In Scoble’s case I can see it because he holds the promise (but rarely the reality) of giving us deep insights into the working of the Borg. Techmemeorandum may be self-selecting, but with a touch of human intervention, and, inevitably, bias.
Why am I bitching about this? Simple. There are many current developments in tech land that have huge potential impact for all of us. SaaS is but one such issue – something I share with Vinnie, David and Stefan. There is no doubt in my mind that SaaS and BPO are hugely important to practitioners over the medium term. They will disrupt your world. Big style.
The solution is in our hands. If we want to play by Gabe’s rules, and in principle I’m not knocking them, then as Vinnie implores, it is vital to see more material on topics of importance to business and the enterprise. And more linking. Play the game. Otherwise, as Vinnie says there is a risk that business issues get buried:
The tech press made this mistake in the 90s – way too much attention to Microsoft, Apple, Dell – not enough to IBM, SAP, EDS, Infosys…Now you guys are primarily focused on Google, Yahoo, web 2.0 etc
In my terms, we’ll carry on watching the Sausage Game – US consumer blog style.
