On Leaderboards

It's Christmas Eve, above is my most favorite holiday card of all.

Today, VentureBeat, the site I work for, secured the #3 spot on the Techmeme Leaderboard for the first time. Amazingly, one year ago, while the current #1 and #2 (TechCrunch and CNET, respectively) were in the exact same positions, VentureBeat was all the way down at #31.

So what does that mean? Well to a lot of you, probably nothing -- it's mostly insider baseball type stuff. Most tech writers and pundits watch Techmeme religiously -- even if some claim they don't like it. For a glimpse of what is going on in the world of tech, there is simply no better source.

Being on Techmeme's leaderboard means that your site has contributed a lot of the Techmeme headlines in the past 30 days. Is a leaderboard for such things silly? Maybe, but it also serves as a type of validation for a job well done. There's a lot that goes into Techmeme's algorithms to determine what should be a headline (and some of it is now, and has always been human-picked), but the most important factor remains links. If you break a story or write about something in a provocative way, people link to you.

Being high up on the Techmeme Leaderboard to me means that people find what me and my colleagues at VentureBeat are writing to be useful, good or at least interesting. That validation is a nice holiday gift.