Techmeme and finding the most interesting conversations

I have always said – particularly to those who don’t understand blogging – that blogs are not necessarily important individually, but in aggregate they are massively powerful. The “blogosphere” pulls together what millions of talented people around the world are discovering and thinking. Collectively, blogs enable us to collaborate to filter and uncover the most worthwhile news. As I wrote in my second book Living Networks, we are currently all participating in the birth of a global brain, and the world of blogs allows makes visible our collective stream of consciousness.

In that vein, Techmeme is one of the top three sites I refer to – often several times a day – to discover what is the most interesting technology news of the moment. It is an automated site that tracks a continually evolving list of the top few thousand blogs. It uses a complex algorithm to pull out both the most discussed news items or blog posts at that time, and the current conversations between top bloggers that these have sparked. Because of its exclusive scope, you can be sure that the comments are interesting and relevant. More importantly, the site uncovers conversations, discussions, points of difference, disagreements, creating a view on the news that is far more than the sum of its parts. Techmeme’s sister sites – memeorandum for politics, WeSmirch for celebrity gossip, and Ballbug for baseball – fulfil the same role for other topics. Memeorandum in particular provides fascinating insights into the American political debate, and how topics are viewed by partisans of both left and right.

Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand has just interviewed Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera, providing some fascinating insights into Techmeme. I was very surprised to discover that Techmeme has only around 30,000 daily unique visitors, a tiny amount compared to sites like Digg.com, with around 1.5 million per day. Apparently Techmeme is still a tool used by the cognoscenti, including many journalists who use it to discover news stories. However in my mind Techmeme and its sister sites rank alongside Technorati as the most valuable tools to uncover the power of the blogosphere. Joshua Jaffe of The Deal says he’s convinced that Techmeme will be acquired by Google for a stupendous sum. I certainly have no doubt that Techmeme or similar tools for tracking insightful online conversations will soon come to the fore.