You might not be as popular as you think you are

Today’s Interesting news is coming from Scripting News, and Techcrunch over the weekend on how Techmeme is taking on the blog ranking system used by Technorati. While this is great for the big top 100 followed by Techmeme, but that leaves about 75 million blogs out there that either have never heard of Techmeme, or have never been featured on Techmeme. Odds are most likely of that whole pile of blogs out there, many will never be featured on Techmeme.

Technorati is still going to be needed for everyone outside of the top 100, there is no question on that one. Sites like BlogInfluence, Blog Search from Google, and others are all valuable tools; technorati is still going to be a place where people go first. Techmeme is very cool, and a very good source of inspiration, as well as finding out what the big folks are doing. But it is inherently biased in favor of the top 100, the people that bring the page clicks.

Their new index is all about the top 100 blogs as they rise to view and Techmeme rarely if ever has a new blog in their index based on our observations. It is a “good old boy’s” network of bloggers, great as a resource, but not a definitive as to setting who is top anything, or bottom anything. It is a perpetuation of the good old boys club, and you know, in some ways this is ok, in other ways it is discouraging. If you use this to determine the value of a blog, remember that this is the top 100 according to them, just like technorati has their top 100 according to them.

Good for the big folks, indifferent for everyone else on the blogosphere who still wants to know how many people link to them, who links to them, and what their relative merit is in the world of blogging. Many are not in the top 100, and many will never end up on Techmeme, but many are in technorati, and outside of the dog fight for the top 100 score, there are a lot of folks just happy to break the top 100,000 mark anywhere.

In the mean time it is boffo technology, and very cool to have this, but with any ranking or rating system, it is going to be prone to whatever bias went into building it. The question that bloggers need to ask to determine the value of a blog is “how well are you doing against your expectations”? If your expectation was 100 people a day and you are getting 150, then you are doing better than your expectations, if you needed 100,000 people a day and are getting 150, then you need to find your niche a bit better. Technorati is still going to be useful, the new launch tomorrow Techmeme top 100 list should still be interesting, but there are going to be a whole lot of people who will never make on Techmeme, but will make it on technorati.