maramine blog

“Not long ago, if you wanted to take your business laptop on the road with you, you had to strap it on a burro. [Holds up iPhone] I can download 3 million vaginas in a minute onto this.” - Lewis Black

I love Techmeme as much as the next guy, and I’m also going to make the complaint that everyone else makes. New sources please! Gabe Rivera did a fantastic job with the Techmeme concept and site. Everyone knows it. When you start a new tech-related blog you simply haven’t ‘arrived’ until you hit Techmeme.

The one complaint that essentially all of us have is the top tier stories are constantly pulled from the same handful of blogs. Is every single post that appears on Techcrunch really top-tier Techmeme worthy? (The answer by the way, is no)

This is not entirely Techmeme’s fault of course - the tech blogosphere is a giant echo chamber. Techcrunch and the like are the sites that everyone goes to for content. In fact the “take the opposite stance in response to an Arrington post” formula has gotten plenty of mid-range blogs to the next level. At the same time, I would love to see Techmeme tap the breaks a bit.

Intentionally dodge some Techcrunch posts. Sure, they are all linked 50, 100, 1000 times but omit a few anyway. Your advertisers will still get hits, I promise.

There’s a great new planet called meme13 that I’ve been following lately (discovered it on Techmeme of course). meme13 pulls in the 13 newest sites that have appeared on the Techmeme leader board and redistributes their feeds. I’ve found several new blogs this way that I probably would have otherwise passed over. I mean, do you really ever check out more than one or two second / third-tier articles on Techmeme?

Meme13 is a band-aid though, and I want surgery. I want Techmeme to explore some new blogs. It shouldn’t be hard; there are plenty of good ones. Not that I’ve managed to do a good job of moving traffic from the other blogs I write for over here quite yet, but maybe I’ll do my part by listing a new blog from my Greader here every week. Yeah, I like it - not that I’ll remember to keep it going.

Week 1: Thanks to Fred Wilson, the latest addition to my Greader is Over The Counter Culture. The author is a heavy contributor to the comments section on many Wilson posts (by the way, I believe A VC collectively has the best commentents I’ve come across on the net) and his blog is great. Although I don’t recall Wilson’s post linking him directly, I hope a fair number of his readers follow the trail because there is a great blog at the end of the road.