If you haven’t heard, Techmeme has a new feature, the “Leaderboard“.  TechCrunch is heralding it as the defeating the last stronghold of Technorati.  Robert Scoble is lamenting the “death of blogging”.  Techmeme itself says the list consists of “Techmeme’s top 100 sources, including blogs, non-blogs, and everything in between”, so they’re not trying to be the sort of “Blog Authority” everyone else seems to be trying to make them. 

I don’t think Technorati nor blogging in general have anything to worry about.  Technorati is suppose to be aimed squarley at blogs, in this case I’m defining a blog as “The single and unfiltered voice of an individual”.   Techmeme’s Leaderboard is solely a list of the most newsworthy sites in a particular month, some of which just happen to be blogs. 

The best authority for the top bloggers is, of course, the bloggers themselves.  Until Google starts to release an aggregated form of their users’s Reader Stats (which may indeed herald the end of Technorati), we’ll have to turn to each other and Technorati will show us that.

In the interest of promoting tech blogs that deserve to be noticed, I provide you with my current personal “Tech Blog Leaderboard” based on my personal Reader trends:

• MSDN Blogs:  Surprised?  You shouldn’t be, Microsoft employs alot of smart people, this is the best way to find out something you didn’t know before.  And it’s not necessarily Microsoft specific all the time.
• Worse Then Failure:   Geeky humor, and great examples of what NOT to do for coders.
• Slashdot:  Still a good resource after all these years, not a blog, yet still not on Techmeme’s Leaderboard either…
• CodingHorror:  Everyone in development should be subscribed to this blog.
• Scobleizer: Cause Robert Scoble always has neat stuff.
• Robert’s Shared Items:  Doing all the crawling/subscribing so I don’t have to.
• Jon Skeet’s Coding Blog:  Man knows his C#.
• Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories: Cause deep inside we’re all evil geniuses.
• Scott Hanselman’s Computer Zen:   I mean, doesn’t the fact he’s not on the Leaderboard make you question it just a bit?

That’s just a sampling, alot of webcomics and non-tech blogs in my reader too. 

What are some of your favourite/regular tech blogs? Is there anyone that I’m obviously missing that I just HAVE to subscribe to?

Robert Scoble did an interesting tour of Intel’s new fab plant yesterday, he thought so much of this video that he is beside himself on the number of sites that didn’t post it. Robert thought that this video was so important to be linked that he admits to comment spamming in an attempt to have major sites link to it!

I really don’t understand what’s going on here, increasing traffic to his site doesn’t increase any revenue for him (his blog has no text ads on it), he’s already a well known and influential blogger. Who cares of Engadget and Gizmodo isn’t linking your stuff? Maybe it’s because PodTech.net is a /direct/ competitor? Furthermore, I wouldn’t consider Engadget nor Gizmodo to be a “blog” really. They’re both too large and commercial oriented to have the feel of a personal blog.

Scoble does air a concern that the era of linking to each other is over. However, he does not provide any hard evidence for this assertion. I think it would be an interesting experiment to examine some of the bigger blogs in Technorati say, and see who they link to and how often.

I don’t think the problem is a lack of linkage, I think the real problem is bloggers producing unique content. Most blogger’s are more concerned with getting listed on digg, they regurgitate some other site’s story with a little flair added in, and hope they can get on the front page. If you want the link, break the story or produce the content! And if you’re so big that you’re competing with other sites, don’t be surprised if they don’t link to you out of habit!

I’ll just chalk up Robert’s rant to us hitting the most depressing time of year. I still love you man! *blogger man-huggers*