February 14th, 2007

Rebuilding the Old Boss

by Joshua Porter  |   8 Comments

Looking down the headlines at Techmeme lately has been like looking at the news headlines from the big corps in the world.

Of the first five big stories at the moment, 3 come from the New York Times, 1 from Google, and 1 from Microsoft.

On the one hand, this is good for the New York Times…they’re obviously keeping up with the blogosphere, as well as they should…they’ve got some of the best writers in the world there.

If Google and Microsoft even sneeze they get noticed in the blogosphere. Today the “big” news is that Google Webmaster is coming out of beta and Microsoft’s response to the speculation about the next version of Windows…WOW.

(thankfully, my buddy Richard MacManus from Read/WriteWeb is sixth in line…with some novel analysis of online video technologies.

I don’t think this is a bad thing for Techmeme, either. It’s just tracking what the blogs are talking about…and what they’re talking about is what big media is talking about. If it is tracking the social streams of news, then that’s great, even if it feels like an echo chamber at times.

From a personal standpoint, I try to read people who shy away from recapitulating. On second thought, maybe I don’t subscribe to them simply because I know I can find the info out on Techmeme. That’s probably more likely.

Sometimes I struggle with choosing topics myself. Obviously, there is news that should be shared, like the recent Pew study on Tagging, for example. I want you folks to know about that, so I’ll blog about it even though I know there is a high probability that you’ll hear about it elsewhere.

I appreciate what Alex Barnett said. Something to the effect of: “If I see it on Techmeme, I won’t blog about it”. I probably wouldn’t go to that extreme, but I understand the sentiment.

I wonder if people who have been around for several paradigm-changing technologies watch this sort of thing happening and secretly repeat to themselves: “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”.

(Update: Ironically, this post made Techmeme (under the Read/WriteWeb article)

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