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The Techmeme pile-on — good or bad?

Started by mathewi · 1 year ago

Tim O’Reilly has a great post up on O’Reilly Radar, in which he talks about what might be called (although he doesn’t use the term) the “stupidity of crowds.” Using the meltdown in quantitative hedge funds, Facebook apps and Techmem ... Continue reading »

11 comments

  • Techmeme is great for finding edge blogs.

    I find reading the edge blogs is more useful than reading the ones that front page -- because they'll pick up and add to anything interesting the front pagers say.
  • That's why I've never understood the value of blog trackbacks or why such great emphasis is placed on them by searches. Just seem to be "me too" on steroids. What value do they actually bring to the conversation?
  • I can't help but agree with Tim. While a certain amount of reinforcing behavior is necessary to get the full scope of opinions about a subject, I think that because we all source our material from the same limited set of sources we are -missing- a lot of interesting pieces of news.

    Unfortunately, this means that we are also propagating this rather myopic view to our readership.
  • Steve, I think that's why it's incumbent on all of us to find the new and different voices -- and then pile onto them and drive them up the leaderboard :-)
  • this concept, coupled with the fact that all these web apps are becoming commoditized, will help value shift over to human intelligence, people-edited stuff.
  • How timely, I noticed the same today.

    http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/10/16/b...
  • we should try an experiment, Matt. heh.
  • I've noticed that the "dogpile" effect is more prevalent in blog communities where authors tend to refer to each other by their first names under the assumption that all readers -- even those of us "on the edges" -- will know who they are.
  • new comment system Dave?

    I would take this also why everyone is so gaga over facebook in the valley. Not taking away from the impressive levels that FB has achieved but it's not MSFT and it's not Google and I just don't see it being so. But based on the wisdom of the crowds in the valley - if your start-up doesn't have a FB strategy then you're not in the game. We've only talked to one (big) VC firm who thinks that FB and others will have a hard time making money in the future.
  • I'm thinking a word.

    what is it...

    um...trying to remember...

    oh yeah...

    SELF-OBESSESSED??

    (and for the record, I’m not knocking it…some of my favorite people are self-obsessed.)
  • Honestly speaking, most of the time, I don't have a clue what's #1 on TechMeme, as I just get the headlines via RSS. I'll know if something made it, but not where it sits. By the time I'd get around to trying to follow the crowd, the effort would be fairly useless.

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