How To Split An Atom

Get more articles like this and Register for our Forum.

It looks like its open season on lists that arbitrarily link authority to some weak metric in order to ascribe meaning to what basically amounts to a randomly generated collection of news sites. The newest entrant is a list of top sites based on their Digg saturation, the number of times they have appeared on Digg.

This one actually makes more sense than many of the others. Getting on the Digg’s front page usually involves getting news quickly enough not to be a duplicate, being reputable enough to draw a large crowd (more people means a higher chance likelihood that you will get Dugg), and having enough trust in the network that you don’t immediately get buried.

Lets take a look at this list compared to some of the others and see if we can see any patterns.

Digg Saturation

1. YouTube
2. yahoo.com
3. Google
4. Ars Technica
5. Engadget
6. BBC
7. Gizmodo
8. Wikipedia
9. wired.com
10. CNN

Digg’s list has a smattering of Tech blogs, a few mainstream media companies (BBC, CNN, Wired) and huge content aggregaters near the top. This list seems to most accurately represent real usage statistics amongst normal Internet users. YouTube is extremely popular, next comes the search engines and then technology and political news to round out the day.

Techmeme Leaderboard

1. TechCrunch
2. Engadget
3. New York Times
4. Ars Technica
5. CNET News.com
6. Read/WriteWeb
7. The Register
8. GigaOM
9. BBC
10. Silicon Alley Insider

Techmeme has the built in bias of only caring about Tech news. That not withstanding, what is worthy of note is that Techcrunch and Engadget rank above the New York Times on this list. I doubt that Gabe would ever say that his list is a measure of authority, but I have a hard time seeing this as a measure of anything other than the output of his algorithm.

Technorati’s Popular

1. Engadget
2. Gizmodo
3. Boing Boing
4. Techcrunch
5. Huffington Post
6. Ars Technica
7. Lifehacker
8. Mashable
9. Blog di Beppe Grillo
10. Daily Kos

Technorati’s classic “we’ll rank you based on link-backs” list. All talk of gaming the system aside, I should note that this is the most diverse of the lists presented. I mean diverse in Internet terms, which amounts to a smattering of tech news, political commentary and an Italian comedian/politico (Beppe Grillo).

More interesting still, this is the first time Mashable, Boing Boing and Lifehacker made the list. The best reason I can come up with is that all of these sites provide interesting reference points as opposed to news. This tends to draw huge numbers of links, without necessarily putting them on Digg or Techmeme’s radar.

Web 2.0 Roundup

What can we take away from the Internet’s attempt to rate itself? Well, it seems like we love tech news, politics and funny things. If you did not recognize that before this roundup, you have been on the wrong internet. Just for a laugh, I’ve decided to arrange my own “Top 10″ list. My methodology was to pick sites that I believe hold the most value for normal users, and would likely do the best if turned into print media. Just to make it fair, I decided to only pick sites that also made one of the other lists.

The list isn’t arranged in any particular order.

Lifehacker. Lifehacker provides interesting tips and tricks for being more productive and making the most out of your day, instant classic.

Ars Technica. Detailed, Old Media style reporting. Despite their occasional lack of proper citations, Ars has managed to maintain a strong voice in tech reporting. Not only that, but they are the only ones to make all three of the lists.

Daily Kos. The Daily Kos is a well respected source for political news. For the sake of this list, I picked them because they have had more play in popular culture (via the Colbert Report and others) than the Huffington Post. I also like their collaborative reporting a bit more, it’s oh so Web 2.0.

New York Times. I have my problems with NYT and mainstream media in general, but the New York Times is still the best source of real journalism of any of the sites featured in these lists.

Read/WriteWeb. It was a toss up between ReadWriteWeb and Techcrunch. I choose Richard’s blog because it generally provides a more detailed analysis of the tech news of the day. Also, this kind of analysis would likely have a wider appeal to mainstream audiences who are more interested in understanding tech trends than in the nitty, gritty details of acquisitions.

BBC. It also made two of the previous lists and for good reason. The BBC is a media powerhouse and certainly worth mentioning in any list of relevant reading material.

Engadget. Engadget beats Gizmodo only because I think gadget news is about scale. Engadget manages to bring together a ton of material every single day, blurring the line between blog and web magazine.

Wired. What would tech publishing be without Wired and it’s related entities? No, this isn’t a trick question.

Boing Boing. The most “general interest” of the sites that I have listed. You can always count on Boing Boing to get you thinking about something. Sometimes thats all you can ask for out of a news source. Also, they also have a relatively successful print magazine which proves that they have mainstream appeal.

Mashable. Honestly, they only made the list because I once saw them put together a top 5000+ list of “web things”. I call a list like that, the Internet.

[Be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed before leaving. Photo Credit]