Anyone who’s followed Techmeme knows TechCrunch and Michael Arrington should be at the top of any list of authors and story sources for the blog aggregating site. Vik Singh thought it would be interesting to make those lists.
The arrival of the Techmeme Leaderboard generated plenty of chatter among those on and off the list. Robert Scoble used the linkbait title, “TechMeme list heralds death of blogging?”, in his post about its debut, as one example.
The Techmeme Leaderboard only shows the top 50 sources for a rolling 30-day period. Looking at it today, TechCrunch, The New York Times, and Engadget are the top three sources most frequently occurring on Techmeme.
Fortunately, Singh found the Leaderboard an interesting development, one that he could take farther with a little data mining. He compiled four lists to find some basic statistics:
I wrote up some code to crawl and analyze Techmeme articles over the whole year (Leaderboard shows the Top 50 sources for this month). I took a snapshot of Techmeme at 1:00PM every day between beginning January – end of September of 2007.
I computed basic statistics, like number of stories by author and source, as well as more involved measurements like the top word mentions of the year – in total and by category (used simple NLP to clean up the text and remove stopwords).
His list of most stories by author, unsurprisingly, featured the prolific Arrington as the first named person on the list (unattributed stories dominated what Singh found), followed by Om Malik, Greg Sterling, Andy Beal, and Donna Bogatin.
Stories by source showed TechCrunch just ahead of Engadget, followed by Digg, News.com, and SearchEngineLand. Google, Microsoft, and the iPhone were the most mentioned words; again, no surprise considering their dominant positions in search, operating systems, and gadgets, respectively.
