TechMeme is this fantastic website that rolls up the hottest topic on the blogosphere at the moment. For example, if you write some that insterests a lot of people, and a lot of bloggers notice that and write themselves referring to your original post, you might appear on the Homepage of TechMeme.
That works fairly well, but it has a fundamental flaw, IMHO. Blogs that are popular, like TechCrunch, Scripting News or Scobleizer will get lots of link if they write something interesting or not, just because of the sheer number of readers.
Well, this is where a handy IR (Information Retrievel) technique might work. And this is how it goes...
In text analysis (this is an oversimplification), words that occur the most are not as valuable as words that occur a few times. If you look at papers about lung cancer, the word "Mesothelioma" is more relevant in a document than the word "are". Not because of the instance count on that document per se, but because of the instance count of all words on all documents.
Now, if TechMeme really wants to surface the out of the ordinary news, that are popping on the blogosphere, they should apply a factor to each blog inverse proportionally to the average number of daily links to that blog.
This way, if TechCrunch averages 500 links per blog post, and they get 5,000 for a single blog post, that is worth noticing. But right now, they get less than 500 and appear every day on TechMeme.
I thought the Blogosphere was about distributing power, not shifting from a single group (Mainstream Media) to another (A-list bloggers).
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