If you follow technology blogs, Techmeme soon becomes almost irreplaceable — it’s like a front page for the blogosphere, one that changes almost minute-by-minute to show where the big fires of commentary are (for better or worse), and where the small sparks that could touch off a new one are coming from. It’s almost biological in a way, and so it’s fascinating to see Amit Agarwal’s time-lapse video of Techmeme, taken over a 50-hour period and condensed into 50 seconds of video.
It looks an awful lot like those Time-Life documentary shorts that show ants in the desert erecting a giant anthill with tiny scraps of fluff and lint (and critics might say the fluff and lint part is right on the money). So what is Techmeme.com building? Consensus, I think. It’s like a continuously running poll. Sometimes the questions are ephemeral, and sometimes they are pretty important. In any case, it’s fun to watch.