As a fan of Techmeme, I try to stick up for the site whenever someone writes about how it’s just an “echo chamber,” or how it’s dominated by the “A-listers” — so it’s nice to see a little empirical data from Yuvi, the 17-year-old data guru behind Statbot. Yuvi and his statistical abilities were recently re-discovered by the now-ubiquitous Louis Gray (who himself is living proof that Techmeme and the so-called “A-list” can be broken into by just about anyone if they are determined enough).
Yuvi tracked the data from Techmeme’s headlines and found that while 30 per cent of those headline links come from what might be called “A-list” blogs, another 30 per cent come from blogs that are probably on the C or even the F-list. It’s easy to complain about that first 30 per cent — and perhaps it’s even valuable to point out that a certain proportion of the blogosphere gets more than its share of attention.
That’s a good thing to remind ourselves of, even just so that we can all keep our eyes open for new and worthwhile blogs, like Corvida’s SheGeeks, or Sarah in Tampa, or the next Louis Gray. But I still think not enough attention gets paid to the other 30 per cent that Yuvi talks about — the blogs that are just being discovered. They are there — all you have to do is look for them. And when you find them, link to them.