Since, as you’ll have noticed, I’ve already created my own blog, I’m not exactly the target audience for this book. Nonetheless, this puts me in a good position to tell you whether the information it contains is useful or not. (Short version: it is).

This is a book of two halves. The opening chapters describe what blogs are, how to set one up, choose a name and what sorts of things you might write about. That sounds a bit vague, but actually Tris goes into a lot of detail on how to choose between different platforms and the intricacies of which settings to use. The emphasis is on a self-hosted Wordpress platform, which is not the simplest choice but it is one of the most versatile, while remaining intelligible to normal people. That may well be a show-stopper for confirmed Drupal addicts and so forth, but then, they aren’t the target reader either.

The second half of the book runs through the aforementioned six projects. These are a personal blog, a business blog, podcast blog, photoblog, videoblog and lifestream. In each case, he runs through a content strategy – including employee and comment policies in the case of business blogs – and the specifics of what settings, themes and plugins you should get hold of to make a good fist of what you’re doing. There’s also plenty of examples of good (and bad) practise. Despite the broad scope, there’s plenty of detail for each of these case studies. I learned a lot about the areas that I haven’t spent much time on, and picked up useful tips for those I have.

Tris’ writing style is light and airy and – well – bloggy. That makes for an easy read, even when he’s describing which particular set of plugins work well for podcasting and how you should set them up. If you’re a corporate suit, then you might find it too casual – but let’s face it: you won’t read this review and you probably shouldn’t set up a blog. The structure of the chapters is blog-like as well, with lots of sidebars and boxouts with asides going into detail on some particular point of interest. A well-constructed index and table of contents means that these don’t get lost when you try to find them again. Tris also ‘links out’ a lot from the book, introducing me to a number of blogs that I hadn’t  come across before that represent ‘best-of-class’ examples for a particular format.

When you buy the book, you get access to the complete e-book text online – which seems to have become the norm for technical books. I approve of this trend – it’s hard to follow the text in a book and type at the same time. Apparently, there was a companion blog to the book, but this now redirects to the appropriate section of Tris’ site – which remains a good source for blogging tips.

So a thumbs-up from me: it’s comprehensive and very readable and even very experienced bloggers will learn something useful or re-think some of their opinions.

Oh, and you can check out the opening chapter below to see if you like the style.

Sample Chapter from Create Your Own Blog (chapter 3)

picture credit: Mike Licht

Your old stuff – the stuff you wrote before, even your best stuff – mostly turns bad. It always did, but the Internet remembers. The churl.

Most people don’t bother about it. I, however, am foolish.

I’ve recently started using the Broken Links Checker plugin on this site. It finds the articles and sites you’ve linked to that don’t exist anymore. I did it because had a feeling that there was a need for some curation of my old articles:

• It seems like a bad service to readers to send them to content that you know isn’t there. If you click on a link that says ‘Ten things about X’, and you only get five, because the rest of it has disappeared, then you’d be disappointed, I’d suggest. Probably a bit annoyed with the person who sent you.
• I’m told that Google regards broken links with a stern eye and downgrades you accordingly. I want to be found (still need a new job, people!) and so this seems like a squandered resource.
• There’s a sense of personal and professional hygiene to this. They may have link-rot, but dammit, I don’t.

Anyway, I ran it and it found about 300 broken links in old posts.

Drat.

In a lot of cases, the broken link didn’t matter – it was just a case of extra information that wasn’t essential to the heart of the piece. Nonetheless, I get annoyed when I click on something and it doesn’t work; I expect you do, too. It wouldn’t be right to just leave it there.

In some cases, it ruined the whole article:

• Check out this research report – I think that… [Except the research report isn’t there any more and so readers have nothing to go on].
• Cool video from XYZ – pass it on… [Not so cool when it doesn’t exist anymore or has been removed].

So what to do about this?

Maybe, in an ideal world, I’d go back and either (a) find the Internet Archive cache of the old file and re-link it or (b) rewrite the post to explain exactly what the report said or what was so cool about that video, so seeing it didn’t matter.

But that isn’t going to happen: if I had extra time to spend on this blog, it would be to create more new posts, not fool about with stuff from four years ago.

So back in the real world, my options are (a) delete the post; (b) brief note of explanation; (c) ignore it; or (d) unlink the link.

I’ve mostly gone for (d) unlinking. In some cases, I have deleted: hey, check out this cool video you can’t see.

Shouldn’t you delete the post when the evidence or source no longer exists?

No. Because there’s this whole permalink thing to blogger culture. If you wrote something, then it should be there forever. We made a break with the ever-breaking links of other media outlets and decided that these records are set in stone. Links disappearing every five minutes was a bad phase for the Internet and we made the right decision. I agree with all of that, except if it means that something useless is there forever, because I was linking to a source that couldn’t care less about that whole idea.

And also, I have sinned enough. I have a confession to make. I changed the permalink structure of this blog a few weeks ago, rendering almost all inbound links useless. [Short version - I got some bad SEO advice that killed server performance - see this for good advice]. Mea culpa. If I knew more about Wordpress and search when I started, I would have done it better.

Hehe. You were so dumb in 2006.

Another consideration. I certainly was (am). A lot of my early posts are naive and sometimes stupid to my and your 2010 eyes (not saying that never happens anymore). Should I wipe them to make me look cleverer? No. That’s OK, in a way. The blog is also a personal history, and stupidity plays a major part in that. In my case, anyway. If this was a company blog? Hmm. Well, maybe I’d make a few edits, especially if the old guy had left.

So the broken links are displayed with the <del> attribute, mostly.

picture credit: zen

This is a slim volume – 162 pages which includes a lot of pictures, in the form of greyscale screengrabs. It currently costs just £7.99 on Amazon UK, though it’s £15.99 if you buy it in a shop. The book is aimed at both senior executives thinking about what a company’s strategy ought to be for a blog and those tasked with managing the execution. It would also be useful for sole-owners and small businesses looking to expand their online offering, though the text assumes that you’re part of a larger organisation.

It’s well-written and contains lots of examples. Unusually for a book about the Internet, it’s also pretty-much up-to-date, appearing to have been finished late last Autumn. The case-studies, while uniformly North American, are mainly fresh and the authors aren’t afraid of criticising companies and organisations whose blogging strategies seem to have gone awry. The information and advice it gives is sound and practical and is careful to remain focused on meeting business objectives like more sales, better customer relations and reduced support costs.

So an overall recommendation from me, if you are interested in the idea of having a blog for your business but are not entirely sure why or how to start. But I do have a caveat…

The book is trying to do two things at once: provide a strategic direction and management information for corporate blogging and give a practical guide to choosing platforms, deciding policies and creating content. It’s already really thin, so this means that it doesn’t provide much detail on any particular aspect. For example, it talks about some of the pros and cons between different platforms such as Moveable Type and Wordpress, and hosted solutions such as Wordpress.com, blogger and typepad. But since it can only spend 50 words on any particular platform, and there’s a redundant half-page picture of each of these, you’re left with ‘there are lots of different platforms, each of which have some advantages’ as the overall message. There’s also some misinformation in this section, such as: “[because it owns the platform] Google place[s] Blogger blogs higher in Google search results.” See, for example, Andy Beard countering this. The sections on business strategy are similarly starved of detail or any theoretical underpinning for some of the assertions made.

In fairness, most business books are a bit like this: thin. They aim to give executives enough information to make some reasonable decisions, but not so much that they get bogged down in the minutiae or put off by the bulk. IMHO, though, readers would have been better served by choosing between two books: one for executives about strategy and one for the person managing the blog.

To give you an overview, this is my two-minute version of the book:

Ch1: blogs are a rising media force and they can bring customers and potential customers to your website. Also good for search.

Ch2: get people to read your blog through integrated marketing, tools like RSS, other social media platforms and by providing useful information and good service.

Ch3: there are lots of different types of blog – so choose one that best serves your business. It might end up being a tumble-log or podcast, for example.

Ch4: be useful to your readers and responsive to comments. Take comments on board and deal with criticism fairly and calmly.

Ch5: use your business’ expertise to find topics to write about. And why you might want an internal blog for staff as well.

Ch6: get people who are enthusiastic about the subject matter to do the content. This will probably involve the Marketing department, but also others like R&D and freelancers. Make it sound authentic.

Ch7: get eyeballs [sic] for your blog with good writing and content, a readable design, SEO and conventional marketing techniques.

Ch8: getting multimedia content onto your blog isn’t that hard. You can use other people’s – if you get permission or it’s CC licensed – or you can create your own. [This chapter is one that particularly suffers from the word limits: making a podcast – get audacity – open source music here – put it up on iTunes.]

Ch9: get ready for the future by using semantic features and maybe mash-ups. Oh, and mobile. Oops – we’ve run out of words.

The second book is Tris Hussey’s Create Your Own Blog. It’s a bit thicker, so expect that review in a week or so.

And when I say ‘essential’, I obviously mean ‘used by me’ and ‘jolly handy’.

Comments and Spam

Akismet

Owned by the publishers of Wordpress itself, you’ve already got this one if you have a Wordpress blog. Akismet does a great job of detecting spam. Partly a crowd-sourced effort, since every spam comment rejected by users goes into the service’s database. Needs some backup, though, since you tend to get a lot of stuff to check on the ’suspected spam’ list every day. Definitely keep it installed and active, though.

[addendum: I am trialling WP-SpamFree, as recommended. A previous version created a couple of false positives, so feeling cautious and checking the logs.]

Back-Type Connect

Helps to join-up the dots when discussion of your post takes place on Twitter or FriendFeed, or even another person’s blog who cites your own post as an influence.

Subscribe to Comments

Lets readers who leave comments elect to receive emails if further messages are posted to the current comments thread. A bit of a no-brainer. Can’t imagine why it isn’t built into WP in the first place.

Housekeeping

Broken Link Checker

The web is ever-changing and the stuff you linked to yesterday may not be there tomorrow. Keeping dead links alive is poor service to readers and weakens your credibility with Google. This plugin flags up broken links to readers with the [del] attribute and creates a handy to-do list (*yay*) at the back-end for you to re-link or delete.

FD Feedburner Plugin

This redirects requests for your RSS Feed to the Feedburner version, allowing you to collect stats from readers who prefer the RSS edition of your work and adds the results to Google Analytics reports. This version, rather than the official one, seems (at the moment) to work better.

Front-End Editor

Obviously, the moment you notice that glaring spelling error comes exactly 1.4 moments after you press the ‘Publish’ button and are ready for a well-deserved cup of tea. Going back into the admin interface is a pain. This (frankly amazing) plug-in lets you simply double-click on the post from the front – like the name says – and make your changes right-there in an AJAX-ey mini-edit box.

Google XML Sitemaps

Allegedly entices Google, Bing and the rest to more accurately and frequently spider your site for new content. Looking at my logs, they’re round here all the time anyway, especially those buggers from Microsoft. I keep it activated as much as a rabbit’s paw than anything else.

Redirection

This blog has been going for nearly four years now, if you include earlier variants on Blogger etc. I realised recently that I had something like 20 categories, with most posts belonging to 2-5 of those. Slimming it down meant merging and deleting some categories. This plug-in stops visitors (and search engines) getting frustrated by redirecting them to the new address.

Wordpress Mobile Pack

A suite of plug-ins and themes that mean mobile users get a mini version of your site that will look OK on their phone’s browser and load quickly. My mobile traffic has risen by 5% since installing it last month and now equates for over 10%. ‘Nuff said.

WP Super Cache

Makes Wordpress a lot faster for your visitors by serving them up pre-prepared pages. Should you get a traffic spike (haha) then your server will not disconnect you as quickly. This is good.

On Page

Similar Posts

There are literally dozens of similar/related post plugins (i.e. the bit that says ‘you’ve read this, why not look at these?’ at the end of posts), but this one is doing great service. Its rivals seem to either find very poor matches or take up so much processing power that they either fail or result in really slow page loads.

Sociable

The ‘share this post on social media sites’ thingy that appears at the end of articles. This one has the benefits of (a) looking nice and (b) not loading images and scripts from another server – something that will slow your site down considerably.

[addendum: I have switched to Light Social. Not as pretty, but it does render valid CSS and is even quicker.]

WP-PageNavi

Makes the handy-dandy this page out of X / go forward / back navigorator at the bottom of most pages. Looks cute and is apparently good for letting Google sniff-out your content.

Sidebar Widgets

delicious-plus

There’s a dozen or so delicious sidebar widgets available. This one seems to be the most reliable. Delicious (like Twitter) only accepts a limited number of calls to the source per hour, so you want a widget (like this) that doesn’t go to the source on every page load, but rather caches it away for an hour or so.

flickrRSS

Can be tricky to set up – or it was for me – you need to set the cache folder up on your server to be read/write. I’m not a photographer, but the benefits are definitely worth the effort, nonetheless – the official widgets from flickr will baulk half the time and delay page loads for the rest. Also allows flexible styling through CSS, as not seen here.

Linkable Title Html and Php Widget

Bit of an unwieldy name, but really useful. Lets you create widgets from XHTML and Javascript that stay in style with the rest of your site, without CSS, rather than sticking out like a sore thumb. And also allows PHP queries within a widget – like the Featured Posts widget above-right (“show last ‘X’ entries with the tag ‘Y’”, in that case). Okay, a bit nerdy. But you will want it at some point, I promise.

Twitter Stream

Again, there are a billion variants. Most poll the Twitter API on load which leads to delays and frequent failures. This one caches for a little while and doesn’t look like cat-sick.

WP-EasyArchives

Nifty looking archives with collapsible bits. Who wouldn’t want that? OK. Maybe not strictly essential.

WP-RecentComments

The recent comments sidebar widget that looks less-bad than the default. I’m of the opinion that letting visitors see that people do actually comment on your site encourages them to comment themselves. And that is – most often – a good thing in itself.

SEO Plugins

Nothing.

I’ve tried a few search-engine optimisation plug-ins and may do again, but my current thinking is that, unless you have adopted the worst Wordpress theme ever and have no understanding about search and your content is terrible, you’ll be fine with what WP offers out-of-the-box.

[addendum: a couple of readers recommended All-in-One SEO. Digging around a little, I discovered the fast-developing young pretender Light SEO, which does the same thing but with less of an overhead. Bit hard to tell how it's doing, of course, but it's made an improvement to my title tags at the very least.]

Any recommendations?

It also lets you test your site using ready.mobi – this is available to anyone, with or without the plug-in. You may find it instructive to give a go on your own site(s). Apparently, I still have some work to do to make twopointouch standards-compliant.

Part of the suite measures the number of hits from mobile browsers. I found the results rather shocking:

7% of your traffic is currently from mobile users.
You’ve had 93 desktop hits and 7 mobile hits in the last 11.8 minutes.

Really? In that case, I have two things to say:

1. I’m really sorry it took me so long to install a mobile alternative to the full fat site. Why didn’t you say something?
2. I hope it looks OK. Let me know in the comments or on twitter if you have any issues or ideas. Can’t do anything about the quality of the writing, I’m afraid.

I also had a go with Mippin, which does a similar service. Upside: no configuration required. Downside: no configuration allowed.

I’ve been making some changes to this site recently: upgrading to the newest version of Wordpress, choosing a new theme and fiddling with the layout.

One thing I discovered is that, unless you’re running a very minimal installation, it’s quite easy to run out of memory, even with only a handful of plug-ins. Versions of the software have become slightly larger since Wordpress 2.6 or so, plus plug-ins have become more ambitious, not to mention the increased usage of rich content like videos and AJAX transitions.

Every time I tweaked something, I ended up with blank pages and an error message like this:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of X bytes exhausted (tried to allocate X bytes) in /home /Your-Username/public_html/ the particular folder on line X

I searched around for quite some time for advice, and tried each of the following, before ending up at a working solution. They didn’t work for me, but I’ll leave them here since they might prove useful for someone else. Please be very careful, though: some of these ‘handy tips’ will break your entire site.
1) De-activating all but the most essential plug-ins. This is probably good housekeeping advice all-round, but didn’t actually make a lot of difference. The basic install was using 26MB of the 32MB allocated; with a full suite of plug-ins it was just over 28MB. Add some users, and you’ll quickly run out of memory – the extra 2MB from disabling plug-ins didn’t make enough difference.

2) Alter the value of php_value memory_limit in your .htaccess file. Doing this broke the whole site: YMMV.

3) Optimise your database tables using phpMyAdmin. Saved about 200KB. Woop.

4) Adding the line “memory_limit = 64M” in my php5.ini file. Made no difference one way or another.

What actually worked was this.

Open wp-config.php and find this bit:

/** Sets up WordPress vars and included files. */
require_once(ABSPATH . 'wp-settings.php');

Change it so that it reads like this:

/** Sets up WordPress vars and included files. */
define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '64M');
require_once(ABSPATH . 'wp-settings.php');

Touch wood, that’s done the trick. The site’s still as slow as molasses, of course, but at least I’m not running out of memory.

The latest storm in a teacup to upset the blogosphere is the spectre of ‘fast-food content’. Raised as a threat by McArrington himself, the worry is that fast and loose content quickly generated to match popular keywords will swamp quality content in search rankings.

…what really scares me? It’s the rise of fast food content that will surely, over time, destroy the mom and pop operations that hand craft their content today. It’s the rise of cheap, disposable content on a mass scale, force fed to us by the portals and search engines.

This ‘fast-food’ content is actually regurgitated. It’s the copies of original material being re-written hundreds of times again within a matter of hours of its original publication. This may already seem familiar to users of Techmeme. Apparently. if you create lots of content quickly enough about the topic du jour, you can generate lots of traffic. Whether it’s new, well-written or popular won’t really matter, Arrington claims. It only has to be ‘popular enough’ to tip the scales of Google recognition and AdSense style advertising revenues.

E-consultancy today attempted to pour oil on the waters, claiming:

There is a market for content of all types, just as there’s a market for restaurants of all types. You might scarf down an occasional Big Mac at McDonald’s, but that doesn’t mean you’ll never make reservations at the most expensive restaurant in town. And so it goes with content. If you’re looking for information on how to change the oil in your car, you could probably do far worse than the eHow article on the matter.

I think I may be a bit thick, but I don’t really understand the problem:

• There has always been a wealth of cheap/free content on the Web. That’s part of what makes it good.
• Some of that is good quality e.g. much of Wikipedia and some of it is….mmm not so much e.g. Linkfarm material, Answers.com.
• Google – the search engine used by almost everyone – has worked out how to circumvent much of the bad material by depending on the volume of inbound links, whose weighting is in turn determined by the credibility of those link-makers, among other criteria.
• Google also regularly updates the ways in which it finds people trying to cheat their way to the top of search rankings by, for example, rewriting content from other sites and then inter-linking.

More importantly, I think we’ve already established at this point that lots of search engine traffic is not a very effective way to try to make money for a news publisher. The UK newspapers’ relentless war to become the sites with the largest number of monthly uniques over the last 5-10 years has left them all almost penniless. Randoms don’t click on the ads, you see.

What they really want is useful content and useful readers:

Relevant and responsive readerships for advertisers = revenue.

Brands readers trust for quality and such = revenue.

Readers who want value-adds = revenue.

Useful and valuable branded content for relevant readerships = revenue.

A bunch of randoms who found you on Google = MASSIVE SERVER FEES AND NO RETURN (see FAST FOOD).

Arrington shouldn’t fear the fast-food merchants, he should fear the mainstream media catching up on his turf. They may often be a little hapless, not terribly online savvy, but there are an awful lot of them and they’ve still got lots of money to invest in digital publishing to find models that work. And they will keep coming, wave after wave.

I’ve been having a go at the latest chic-geek blogging tool – posterous – recently, as you’ll be able to tell if you look at the posts I’ve made here over the last month or so. But, in the end, I’ve decided not to use it. Why? Read on.

Just to be clear, before I go on to my objections: it’s damned good. If you haven’t yet tried it yourself, the highlights, as I see it, are:

• You can post really easily using email (just email post@posterous.com right now, and it’ll start a new blog for you – the email address you send from is your log-in).
• No login; no set-up; no configuration. A monkey could do it.
• Free – always a consideration. And no apparent limits on anything.
• Great media handling out of the box – send photos, videos, mp3s and it will sort out a nifty player for you.
• Syndication – it’ll repost the content you send to photo/video/text sharing sites and twitter it as well.

See these posts by incumbent Edelman and iCrossing social media champions for a taste of the fervour that people are feeling.

That’s all dandy. It’s really dandy. If I had to set up a blog for someone, I’d send them straight to posterous.

So what’s this ‘past-posterous’ nonsense, you ask? Like most things, there’s a combination of reasons that add up to a discomfort about the whole thing.

(1) I can replicate almost all of those features in Wordpress. Post via email; audio-player, all the rest. It’s not simple, but it isn’t that hard either.

(2) It may sound a bit sad, but I am concerned about ownership of my content. On my own (rented) server space, I have that (as long as I pay the rent). If I put my stuff on a third-party service, then I very-slightly lose ownership and control.

(3) I also wonder how search-engines will interpret this. The first posting of content is normally taken as canonical by Google (i.e the real, original source) and consequently appears highest in search results. Duplicated content is deprecated. This protects against content thieves in normal circumstances, but in this case, the canonical source would presumably be posterous.com, not your personal URL. Another reason to have one canonical source is to protect against black-hat SEO types posting the same content on multiple, inter-linked sites, much ermm… like a fully fledged posterous account might create. That’s a worry, too. I’d like my blog to be the canonical source and not marked as a content duplicator. I’ve had a quick look round the SEO blogs and don’t think anyone has an answer on that yet.

(4) Posterous will undoubtedly launch paid-for plans or advertising schemes to earn revenue. I don’t know what those are or whether they will be successful. I hope that they are. In the mean time, it’s a zero-revenue business. I don’t want to trust my content to that. And I don’t know yet what sacrifices I might have to make to keep a free service in the future. Adverts? Pop-Ups?

Beyond that, there’s another reason. One that twists my melon considerably.

Is there such a thing as too-easy?

For me, there is.

If creating a blog post is as easy as hitting a button and typing twenty words, then I’m opening a Pandora’s Box.

Because I could do that all day, every day. I just thought of a new blog post then – whoosh – there it is. I could be creating 12 blog posts while you’re in the bog. For many long-time blog owners it’s a blessed release. Coming up with new ideas and new posts is a pain. The hard part about blogging isn’t setting one up, as their proliferation shows. There are already at least 200mn blogs. The hard part is keeping with it. Journalistic writing is hard – if you’re doing it right. If you’re doing it right, then you’re thinking about the audience all the time and turning your words and how much or how little you give to make them happier.

One reason to keep with it (and I have several, just in case) is so that people will respect your blog as a quality source, in some respect. You’ve filtered and processed the information so they don’t have to. And hopefully presented it in an agreeable way. You are providing Signal not Noise.

There are some great posterous blogs and tumblr blogs, I’m sure. But they are different – not better or worse – from a really good blog. Some people probably have a twitter-stream that could be made into a book. Not me.

I’ve recently installed a relatively new Wordpress plug-in from the good folk at Backtype.

This is what it does: it scans the web, including social networks like Twitter and other blogs, for mentions of your post and draws those mentions in as comments on the post. This is a good thing in many respects. It helps to give readers a sense of the whole debate, not just the point of view of people who manage to stop-by your site and leave a comment. It links to all its sources.

So why am I fretting?

In some ways, it feels like cheating. When people measure website engagement, the ratio of comments per post is a key indicator. Someone who gets 100 comments on every post is clearly more *cough* important than someone who gets 1 comment, when it comes to blogging and such.

My recent post on the #PRDebate event that we produced at NMK a couple of weeks ago ostensibly has 17 comments. Yet I know only a couple of those were from people who came to this site – the rest are collated from Twitter and other people’s blogs.

Have I stolen those comments in some way? In a way, I have. If other bloggers are competing to be the most popular, then they lose if they don’t use this plug-in. It seems like they’ve got less engagement than an entirely-equivalent-in-every-other-way blog that does use it. Which isn’t true and so that’s not really fair.

However, until people start complaining, I’m going to carry on. Conversations about blog posts are distributed nowadays – you’re more likely to get a reaction on Twitter than your own page; people reference your post on other people’s blogs. Blogs are less important as destinations as people dip into the flow rather than visit sites. Creating a resource, and multiple resources, to let people get the whole picture is a valuable thing. The engagement metric based on comments/posts is in some ways flawed since if people are discussing the post elsewhere, then that’s equally (more!) important than them discussing it on your own site.

Be delighted to hear others’ thoughts on this – comment below or via your own blog, twitter or anything else, it seems.

From the Merriam Webster entry:

Main Entry: re·cid·i·vist
Pronunciation: -vist
Function: noun
Etymology: French récidiviste, from récidiver to relapse, from Middle French, from Medieval Latin recidivare, from Latin recidivus recurring, from recidere to fall back, from re- + cadere to fall

Earlier this evening, I made what some might describe as an immoderate comment on Twitter. To whit, when my friend and colleague Mike Butcher said he’d finally been listed on Techmeme, I twitted:

techmeme is a useless clusterfuck. full stop. I say this with my work hat OFF.

I later elaborated, in response to a request for a better alternative from Mike:

@mbites yep – the grdn and times’ media pages. NMA, brandrepublic and (I hope) NMK. Real money; real business; real issues. Fuck that shit

Some other people asked me to explain. So what I meant was ‘fuck that shit’. And when I say ‘fuck that shit’, I mean this. I am taking a random sample of techmeme versus two regular IT titles – the first two that popped into my head – that I don’t care about one way or another. These are screen grabs at the time of writing:

Compared to this:

or even this:

Top stories:

(a) Proctor and Gamble signing with SAP (computing)

(b) Exclusive interview about UK security leaks (register)

(c) Google possibly maybe interested in OpenID (techmeme)

Here’s a quiz:

- Which of those stories will have most impact on the UK’s economy, and its ability to employ people? (hint: not c)

- Which of these stories is of the greatest interest and importance to UK citizens (hint: not c)

- Which of these stories is based on PR-spin from the company that originated it, and doesn’t actually contain any facts (hint: it’s c)

QED

That’s hardly an exhaustive analysis. But that’s the state of affairs as I write this and almost anytime I look at those three sites.

Oh, I forget, the reason I made the comment in the first place was in response to Mike’s comment that he’d hit Techmeme for the first time. Mike writes the best tech startup blog in the UK. He has done since April 2007 – and has been writing about digital in the UK since forever. But not ‘important’ enough for techmeme, evidently.

Also, the reason for my expression ‘clusterfuck’. Look at this advice from arch-self-promoter Jason Calacanis:

1. Blog intelligently. Think about your post for a day before you hit publish. Do research–do primary research in the real work. Write something with insight, and include links to other folks ideas.

2. Go to 2-3 events or conferences a week.

3. Get a great domain name that is easy to remember and spell (i.e. buzzmachine.com).

4. Go to TechMeme and write an insightful piece daily about one of the top stories.

5. Start emailing other bloggers with feedback on their stories. (don’t beg for links)

6. Be smart.

7. Don’t be an idiot.

That’s it… you’re now A-List.

That’s very good advice, it seems. Write about what everyone else is writing about. Forget about your own identity. Except the way it works out is that any idiot can be an A-lister (as far as techmeme is concerned) by hanging on as many coat-tails as you need to.

Algorithms can only go so far, eh.