I’ve always been a fan of lists of popular sites, particularly the most popular in a given niche. For me, If I’m into a certain subject I can simply go to a web page and get a good general idea of the who’s-who in that space.
Techmeme’s new leaderboard launched yesterday and it’s the hot thing being talked about on a lot of tech blogs right now. Essentially, it’s a list of tech sites, blogs and news sources, weighted by how much space headlines from those sites have occupied on Techmeme over the past 30 days.
That’s all cool and I like it. However, that list is NOT as important as some people in the tech-osphere are making it out to be.
Problem is, it will become more important as time passes, the more weight (ie. mindshare) the A-List bloggers give it - sorta like how Google’s PageRank became important in search engine optimization circles.
Personally, I like the Techmeme Leaderboard already, because I like reading about things in the tech space.
But I’ll argue that the most important element on that page right now is not who’s at the top of the list or what site is at # 77, it’s the accompanying OPML file.
