One of the first places I stop every morning is Gabe Rivera’s Techmeme. Both the blogs I contribute to show up on there from time to time and I remember being quite thrilled the first time it happened. Last night, The Techmeme Leaderboard was unleashed upon us and even before its formal release had generated a buzz around the blogosphere (which you can find on Techmeme of course). Michael Arrington believes that this could spell the end of Technorati, since the Technorati100 was its one remaining differentiator.

However, lets look at it from a different angle. I am a tech blogger, but also a science blogger, and a very rare music blogger. If I am interested in the most discussed science stories of the day, do I go to Techmeme? No, I don’t. I prefer going to Postgenomic, Chemical Blogspace or Scintilla, which do a much better job of aggregating the top scientific stories of the day (using Technorati I believe). Increasingly, it seems that he tech blogosphere faces one huge danger; itself. Tech, much as we all love it and live it, is not the be all and end all of humanity or even the blogosphere. Half the things we argue about don’t mean that much in the grand scheme of things. So it might be nice if, for a change, we sit back and took a good look at why we are bleeding at the eyeballs to get on top of a list of blogs or getting all het up about the definition of blogging.

As an aside, I found it rather amusing to find mainstream media so well represented on the Techmeme leaderboard. Ben Metcalfe has a great take on that subject and on whether we are even tracking “blogs” these days. However, the best headline belongs to Marshall Kirkpatrick on Read/Write Web; “Techmeme Launching Leaderboard; World Likely to Keep Turning“

In the meantime, I will continue checking Technorati to see who’s linking to me until something better comes along.

Technorati Tags: Techmeme, Technorati, Blogosphere