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?

It looks like Mike Arrington of TechCrunch has gotten a little up upset over Dare Obasanjo’s experiment on Wikipedia editing. It seems Mike knows how to stir things up, the digg article on the situation is up over 300 diggs at this moment. Mike Arrington is saying that this Wikipedia page is “vandalized”. Hardly, Dare simply posted a fact about some people’s opinions of the site. Granted it was biased, but that was exactly what Dare was trying to point out.

The question of how to handle obviously biased articles on Wikipedia is a touchy one. You’ll hear alot of talk about democracy and freedom of speech in this situation. The problem with democracy is that it’s nothing but the rule of the mob. Even if everyone agrees on something, that doesn’t automatically make it right. Had no one edited the TechCrunch article back to it’s original state, or added in the opposing view point (as what was done) then no one could argue that democracy wasn’t followed and freedom of speech wasn’t respected.

Mike seems to feel that one sentence on Wikipedia espousing an opinion about someone’s credibility with a couple of links to blogs that assert this, is “The Man Holding You Down”. The problem with this thought is that you can then argue that anyone that doesn’t agree with you or that questions you is simply trying to “silence your view point”. This is a common tactic of people who have no argument. Such a knee jerk reaction does nothing more than strengthen your opponent’s argument.

The ironic thing is that 1) Mike’s original article on TechCrunch was hardly anti-Microsoft, and 2) Dare’s purpose wasn’t to attack Mike Arrington. Dare was simply trying to point out a flaw in the Wikipedia system, namely that it’s a pure democracy where mob rules and not true neutrality.

The whole situation could be resolved by allowing people to edit Wikipedia articles that reference themselves or their companies as long as they do it in a transparent manner.