Techmeme, a technology news aggregator website launched a Leaderboard feature today. Upon unleashing the Leaderboard application to the Internet community, there was some welcoming and some criticism.
Gabe Rivera, the founder of Techmeme, said that this feature ranks sites every 20 minutes based on the amount of headline space that it occupied on the news aggregation service over the past month.
“Is it biased? I wish it were obvious, but there’s no such thing as an unbiased automated news site (or search engine for that matter). Automation doesn’t remove bias, it merely obscures it. The configurations that make Techmeme a tech news site embody some of that bias. Beyond that, headlines are also skewed by Techmeme’s emphasis of business news over areas like video game reviews, developer news, gadget arcana, and green tech. Finally, influencers that communicate mainly in links don’t figure prominently on Techmeme. Slashdot is widely read, yet absent from the top 100,” wrote Rivera.
