Techcrunch just announced that Techmeme, the reference site for tech discussions, will open a new blogs ranking service during the next hours.

They’re taking a different approach, instead of only using incoming links they’re adding a new dimension to the algorithm: the ranking will be based on headlines from their site. What does that mean? What are headlines?

Top news are ranked according to their novelty and, obviously, the number of links they receive. So, what’s adding the Techmeme’s Leaderboard to other similar services that already exist? (keep in mind that Technorati is not the only available top blogs’ list)
As I wrote before they are basically adding a new dimension, time. Technorati takes time into account, by considering only links published during the last six months, but Techmeme goes further.

Only a few links are used on their algorithm , those that have been published during a short time window after the publication of the original post. That’s the concept of the headlines: what makes a news important on a memetracking application? The blog that published it, obviously, but also the number of links received during the first hours (in fact the slope of the graph showing the replies).

That’s pretty interesting, I do believe that discussions could be very useful in determining the best blogs, but another (huge) problem arises.

By looking at Techmeme’s (and sister sites’) home page, it’s not difficult to understand that only a few hundreds blogs make it to the top. So their top blogs’ list would be limited to the top 100 or a little more, while Technorati goes a lot further down the long tail of blogs.
That’s where the real value of Technorati resides.

Update: here’s an interesting analysis by Marshall Kirkpatrick.

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