How Does Techmeme Work?

I don't understand Techmeme.

This morning I wrote a post, called In The Time Of "Me First": IBM Slowr?, and it was picked up by Techmeme as a top-level story:

But I don't know why.

Only one of the four stories in the "related stories" section link to my post: in fact I linked to the Businessweek article. Richard MacManus had a gazillion people linking to his post, and he didn't link to me. Shouldn't his be on the top?

I wonder if this is meme-related: after all the heat generated by the social media dust-up of the recent past, maybe Techmeme looks at the "social" term and decided that my post was going to be hot.

Any clues would be great. Gabe?

[Update: 5:10pm -- I just checked and /Message is still the lead story on the meme, and Read/Write Web and the International Herald Tribune have dropped out altogether. Still confused.]

tags: techmeme, /blip, meme+trackers

Comments

[Gabe]

Hey Stowe...

I'd ask: Are your post and Richard's "Related"? And is it possible your post was the better one to highlight for that given moment? If "yes" to both, then I think Techmeme did the right thing. If not, then not.

As for the particular events leading to this choice, I'd rather not get into it, mostly because such an exposition is difficult to construct with precision, tedious to explain, and in the end serves only bloggers, not other readers, and furthermore only until the algorithms change, which is very frequently!

[Marjolein Hoekstra]

The following features would make Techmeme.com a much better place to visit:

1. Offer me a possibility to search when a particular meme, topic, blog name, URL or personal name was featured on Techmeme

2. Allow me to track a meme by RSS. The more granular, the better.

3. Notify me (by email, IM, RSS, SMS) as soon as a particular meme, topic, blog name, URL or personal name appears on the front page.

My Z-list blog is featured on Techmeme about once every 3 months and so far I admit I find it rather difficult to figure out in what context my blog was mentioned during its exciting 60 minutes of fame.

I'm tracking this comment with coComment in case Gabe or anyone else visits again.