DISQUS

The only way I see social search being really useful is if your trusted group of friends work as a filter for results - so if my buddy conducted a similar search to the one I'm running, it boosts the results he clicked on (hopefully making my results more relevant).

Seeing other users doing the same searches means squat.

Thanks for the link, Mark.

Paul's right to point out that Jay's not CEO of Revision 3 any more - but actually we did speak about it... this article was about Digg, though: I'll be writing about Rev 3 sometime soon.

Funny thing was I never said not driving traffic was this big horrible thing (though reading Dave and Scoble's posts now they seem to be a bit defensive about it). I just thought it strange that nobody ever mentioned that Techmeme doesn't have a very heavy critical mass, especially in the context of this whole leaderboard thing.

To me, it seems a strange thing for aggregator to drive only a little traffic - and it makes me wonder if Techmeme is a little different from the other aggregators. Anyone but the main headlines (not the subheadings) gets barely a whisper of traffic, which is interesting for those of us who make our living publishing content.

Of course it's a branding thing; of course it's an influence thing. What isn't in blogging? But branding and influence only gets you so far, and there's only so much space on a site like Techmeme. I write for a pretty mainstream audience - few of them are likely to know who the big Techmeme hitters are, or care. Does it help me? Does it help them?

Scoble: I think somebody else said it up there first. I wasn't making a value judgement, just trying to get some perspective.

I'm not sure why anyone needs to get defensive about it.

You're right, I imagine that the Guardian doesn't drive vast amounts of traffic either - certainly not my little blog, which ponders along of its own accord. But since we're not an aggregator I don't think it's particularly important or relevant, and nobody's talking us up.

Like I said, I've got a lot of respect for what Gabe's doing - it just seemed to me like nobody was giving any sense of proportion to the leaderboard. Seems like a topic worth talking about, no?

I'm the author of the Guardian blog post you mention.

Sure, there's a quality over quantity issue. Most of us would rather have good, intelligent readers than a swarm of abusive visitors. But I think it's not wrong to have a correction before the scale gets too out of whack.

OK, so there are a maximum of 5,000 top level tech-heads who might drive past you after seeing a story on Techmeme. They're pretty high quality traffic (not exclusively, though). But there are still only 5,000 of them - I'm not sure it's enough of a critical mass to drive forward any kind of ecosystem apart from one based purely on something (a) ladder-climbing (Techmeme as popularity contest).

Don't get me wrong - I like Techmeme; I use it a lot. I just think we've got to keep our toes in touch with reality; the constant chatter about it seems out of line with the actuality of what it does.

1) Does anybody really claim otherwise, Shane? Monkey, specifically, is a diary column and there's a long-standing tradition of partiality. I wouldn't get particularly upset if your email leaked, dozens of them cross the desk every day.

But I'm still interested to know what "we won't take anyone's blog away" means if you are saying you'll get archive those with less than three posts a week.

PS, please take those comments with whatever bucket of salt you require for the comments of a Guardian writer and former MediaGuardian employee.

2) Howard, I don't think I've ever heard Jim say that "nobody should try to make money". Craigslist does, after all. I think there's a fair point that good profit has trumped good product in many cases, and now that there's extra competition from outside sources, the newspaper industry is feeling the burn.

YAB wrote an awful column for the Indy in which she fulminated about bloggers for being boring and self-obsessed, while wondering how on earth they had the time (and surely that must mean the rest of their life is rubbish etc).

"But Yasmin, you write a *column*," I thought. "Sometimes it's boring, and pretty much all columns are self-obsessed."

"And you're all over the telly."

"And the radio."

"And the newspapers, come to think of it. How do you find the time?"

"But “collective intelligence”? Really?"

Depends on how intelligent your friends are, I suppose.

Not sure it's actually got anything to do with CNN, Martin: as far as I can tell from my Twitter friends list it was built by James Cox as an experiment to combine APIs (http://twitter.com/imajes).

Shows what can be easily done with the right open code...