When asked how he keeps up "with the latest tech news when there are so many blogs," Times editor David Gallagher immediately cited TechMeme, a direct competitor of Blogrunner, as "one of my favorite sites." Although the Times serves Blogrunner results from the front of Gallagher's own section, the editor didn't plug the site in his three-paragraph answer. It wasn't the first time the Times forgot about its 2005 acquisition; reporter Saul Hansell says he considered pushing the newspaper to develop something similar before discovering "we actually owned a company that did that" (see video).

It's great that Gallagher knows about TechMeme, a very useful aggregator. But, if he's going to help turn around the Times, he needs to help make Blogrunner more competitive. That means borrowing a key idea from the world of software startups: Eating your own dogfood; i.e. using your own product. And talking about it, when you have the chance.

(We sent Gallagher a couple of emails seeking comment but have yet to hear back; we'll update this post if we do.)

MSNBC commentator Dan Abrams inveighed against the horrors of the "mainstream media."

ABC's John Berman played Captain Phillips to his apartment's Somali-pirate rodents.

Techmeme editrix Megan McCarthy questioned California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman's competence.

Web 3.0 fanboy Alan Meckler gave Twitter "big ups."

Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley mooched off of ex-employer Google again.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.

The claim that websites which link to news stories are somehow harming them has been advanced by everyone from Journal editor Robert Thomson to AP chairman Dean Singleton. As geeks like Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera (left) have pointed out, they are blithering dunderheads who miss the point that links generate traffic to their own websites. Meanwhile, the doddering newspaper barons' cleverer lieutenants are trying to get into the business themselves.

The proof is in a new study by Hitwise, an online traffic-pattern tracker. Analyst Heather Dougherty has found that search engines, portals, social networks, and blogs generate about 40 percent of the link traffic to news websites, a proportion that has remained more or less unchanged for the past two years. Here's the chart:

Besides search engines, what generates the most traffic for news websites? Other news websites, it turns out. CNN.com, MSNBC, Fox News, the New York Times, and NBC's Weather Channel rank in the top 10 traffic sources to the news and media category, according to Dougherty's study.

Techmeme's Rivera argues that news organizations complaining about aggregators aren't just wrongheaded — they're hypocrites, too, he told CNET News:

[The] WSJ (a News Corp. property) and NYT (a key AP member) are both themselves news aggregators. Both maintain sections which quote headlines from external sites. So, constituents of these organizations already know aggregation is useful and fair. This knowledge just hasn't reached AP's and News Corp.'s leadership.

The implication: The newspaper industry's real problem isn't that sites like Google News and Techmeme exist. It's that they don't own them.

(Photo via Gabe Rivera)

Foul-mouthed, abusive, self-loathing Guardian gadfly Paul Carr made a joke as outdated as Wired editor Chris Anderson's economic theories.

Allegedly reformed White House press-corps lothario Jake Tapper reported on others' sleeping arrangements.

Jossip blogger Drew Grant took the Kal Penn news particularly hard.

Chicago Tribune food writer Monica Eng took her job a bit too seriously.

Rachel Sklar of Abrams Research hosted Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera on a trip east.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.

Late Night with Jimmy Fallon producer Gavin Purcell hopelessly shopped for shoes.

CNET News reporter Caroline McCarthy stayed focused on the big, important story of the day.

Slate writer John Dickerson exhibited profound laziness.

Meet the Press host David Gregory fell victim to Twidiocy.

Techmeme editrix Megan McCarthy made a joke about Google's nondiscovery of Atlantis.

Anyone else's tweets we should keep an eye on? Send us more Twitter usernames, please.

The disconnect has been long in the making. The economy is a constant topic of discussion in the Valley — but the question is always, "Why aren't we feeling it yet?"

That's because the bicoastal economy has split apart. After the '90s bubble burst, investment banks slashed their presence here, and have not returned in force. With no IPOs and few large acquisitions, Wall Street's investment banks have realized that the geeks are not going to make them rich. And the geeks have realized Wall Street will not make them rich, either. Small boutiques like GCA Savvian and Frank Quattrone's Qatalyst are taking whatever midmarket M&A action there is; Wall Street's local bankers have been reduced to shopping around private investment rounds in companies like AdBrite and Glam Media.

There's even talk of creating new markets for tech-startup securities which bypass the public ones. Sarbanes-Oxley regulations have made going public an even more tiresomely bureaucratic affair; meanwhile, employees at fast-growing companies like LinkedIn and Facebook are itching to realize some of their paper wealth.

The only potential buyers of those shares are "accredited investors," which the SEC defines as individuals with net worth of more than $1 million or steady income of more than $200,000. Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen recently spoke of the unintended consequences of post-Enron regulations; instead of protecting the public investor, they have resulted in cutting him off from opportunity. The rich will get richer, while the average Joe will never get a chance to invest in the next Google. (Or, one should note, the next Pets.com.)

The Valley's entrepreneurs love to disparage Wall Street. Google's cofounders famously tweaked the bankers' noses by insisting on an egalitarian auction format for the company's IPO. Yet no one has invented a perfect algorithm for distributing the fruits of the Valley's innovation to the investing public. Wall Street's thundering herds of braying brokers, for all their flaws, managed to spread the wealth. The notion of the insular Valley doling out its profits to a crowd of privileged insiders surely appeals to those already inside the circle. But it should alarm everyone else.

Swisher, aggrieved at the lack of recognition for her scoop, accused BusinessWeek and the Times of running "hand-fed" stories, a charge Lacy and Stone's editor denied. (Lacy told me she'd known since the previous Sunday, but had held the information for her column; Stone's editor told Swisher his meeting with Slide that morning was previously scheduled.)

PaidContent.org clearly felt left out. After one of its writers filed a me-too post, editor Rafat Ali skewered Lacy in a followup post, calling her a "doting, in-awe poseur."

On Silicon Alley Insider, Henry Blodget, Lacy's cohost on Yahoo's soon-to-be-launched TechTicker finance show, came to her defense, dismissing PaidContent as an "aging, LA-based digital news blog."

Oh, and somewhere along the way, I managed to write a story on the subject without calling anyone names.

All of which shows how petty bloggers can be, and none of which answers the question of whether this matters to readers. My suspicion: Only to the extent that they may pass over a story they feel they've read elsewhere first. Google News actively punishes scoops, presenting news on a given subject by the most recent article written, a practice which encourages follow-on news articles and blog posts — and, for that matter, makes it hard to discover who actually broke a given story. Techmeme tends to favor the person who writes with most authority, drawing links from other blogs.

Citizen journalists, like everyone else, are most effective when they follow the law of comparative advantage: Let people closer to the story report on Kenya, as KTN is doing for the whole world. Let Scoble report on his own topic of expertise: Robert Scoble. The cause of this latest Scoble-doesn't-care-about-Kenya flap? That most inane form of bloggerthink: It wasn't on top of Techmeme, so it didn't happen. (Photo courtesy of Kenya Television Network)

WSJ.com charges $79 a year for online access, a "costwall" that supposedly locks the Journal out of "the conversation." As a newly-conscripted Journal contributor, my reality is wildly different. The neighbors in my apartment elevator greeted me with "you're the Wall Street Journal writer, right?" after my first article. I inquired and learned the site has more than a million active subscribers. The print paper's daily readership is even higher. Techies overlook the Journal because it's read by the business staff of their companies, not the engineers who surf Boing Boing. Obsessing over Techmeme rankings misses just such other, bigger conversations that barely overlap the Techmeme circuit. Contrary to Scoble's claim, many are smart and few are about Paris Hilton.

That's a lot for a small-time blogger, but nothing for news sites that pull 40,000 to 1,000,000 readers per story. If you're hoping to bring the world to your door, forget Techmeme and go get yourself Dugg for 50,000 clicks — or better yet Farked, where 100,000 readers will be directly linked to your site without Digg's story summaries. If you've got a real news scoop, send it to Matt Drudge — your server can handle a million hits, right?

Got more precise numbers? Gabe? Post 'em in the comments. The bigger publishers' reluctance to share on the record is exasperating.

Unlike Technorati, which tracked the entire blogosphere, Techmeme only tracks a limited set of tech-centered blogs. And make no mistake, all the tech blogs, Valleywag fully included, scramble for top position in any discussion that appears there. (Techmeme differs from most other memetrackers by presenting stories in clusters, highlighting the original story that generates the most blog discussion, and secondarily listing the blogs that link to it.)

The result? The top of Techmeme's Leaderboard lists TechCrunch, a tech blog which enjoys a surfeit of attention from sycophantic entrepreneur-bloggers. And why are they linking to the site? Some may genuinely enjoy it, but I'd argue that most of them are hoping to get TechCrunch editor's Michael Arrington for their startups by linking to his posts. It's a smart strategy, on both Arrington's part and the entrepreneurs'. And Techmeme, founded by Gabe Rivera, who used to crash on Arrington's couch, merely serves to complete the circle. (It should come as no surprise that Arrington himself broke the story of Techmeme's new feature.)

But does anyone believe, for a moment, that TechCrunch is somehow more important than Engadget or the New York Times, the No. 2 and No. 3 news sources on Techmeme's list? It's not, of course. Nor is it better read — not by a long shot.

Techmeme itself enjoys an exceedingly small, if devoted audience. Most of its readers, I believe, are tech bloggers like me, who read it more to check the rankings than to discover news. I love Techmeme, but I also recognize that it's not a big source of traffic.

So why all the fuss about Techmeme's new top-blogs list? By ranking blogs on links, not traffic, it reinforces the founding myth of Technorati: It's not who reads you, it's who blogs you that matters. And by limiting itself to tech blogs, Techmeme confirms most tech bloggers' sheltered worldview. Why pay attention to the world outside, or cater to mainstream readers' interests? The only people worth caring about are the ones already on your blogroll.

Scoble's "theory" is that Facebook, a social network; Techmeme, a very small tech news aggregator; and Mahalo, the umpteenth attempt to organize the Web with human editors rather than robotic "crawlers," can unseat Google, the king of search. His argument centers around the boogie monster of search engine optimization, or SEO. His arguments, such as they are, have several obvious flaws:

• SEO is not inherently evil. It's also how quality sites get relevant results as top links in search results. Google works hand in hand with SEO practitioners to both combat bad SEO and to promote good SEO.
• Scoble ignores link quality, relevance, breadth of results, breadth of search terms, timeliness (how quickly a link appears as well as how long it remains valuable, a problem also known as "link rot") and other factors affecting search quality just as much if not more so than SEO.
• Mahalo, Techmeme, and Facebook are not immune to SEO. (An SEO expert comments that he's gotten search-optimized listings accepted to Mahalo.)
• Even if Mahalo, Techmeme, and Facebook were immune to SEO, Scoble doesn't link these very disparate systems together — aside from drawing some arrows on his whiteboard.
• Even if Mahalo, Techmeme, and Facebook were truly immune to SEO and were plausibly linked together, they would just represent one of many alternative search engines attempting to use social features, voting, human-editing, and several other methods to augment search while trying to compete with Google. Thus far, these efforts have failed.

His theory isn't even backed up by facts. He makes several errors:

• He begins by saying, of his own video, "You couldn't have found this from search." Of course, Google and Techmeme, both algorithm-based search engines, listed his page shortly after posting.
• Then he claims that Google can't compete with Mahalo because their algorithms are "stuck in sand... in cement ... If they changed their algorithms, there would be too much of an outcry." Scoble appears laughably unaware that Google is constantly tweaking its algorithms, routinely defeating SEO attempts to game the system, despite the outcry from search-engine marketers.
• Scoble fabricates the number of search results Mahalo can generate — this, even as he mentions that Calacanis has provided "actual" numbers. Never mind that Calacanis's idealized projection was for the generation of 50,000 results per year by 100 editors, or the updating of 25,000 results using 1,000 volunteers in 15 days. Scoble thinks Mahalo can create 20,000 results a day! Yes, a day.

And he's inconsistent:

• Mahalo is, according to Scoble, immune to SEO, but "Jason [Calacanis] can spam the system all day long."
• Mahalo's results are better, but they are "very incomplete right now."
• Scoble has criticized Techmeme for being a pale imitator of Google News; now he feels it's a Google-beater?
• Scoble actually says a commenter is correct, that Mahalo doesn't scale: "This stuff doesn't scale, and he's right." He then pulls the above Mahalo numbers out of his ass to prove, somehow, that Mahalo does scale.
• He then says to be successful they need to "keep it small." What?
• Despite his argument being predicated on Google's supposed inability to deal with SEO, he refers to algorithms throughout: Facebook's algorithms, Techmeme's algorithms, Mahalo's algorithms, the algorithms to tie these systems together. At one point Scoble shows a glimmer of self-awareness, as he stumbles over this contradiction: "What if the algorithm... what if the algorithm... what if everyone had their own little Mahalo..." What if we all had a pony, Robert?

Scoble then erases his entire argument off the whiteboard and whispers that Yahoo will be the real winner because they bought some social sites and because they have "weird mojo." Okay then!

Techmeme is a niche news aggregator using a small subset of sources to provide a daily flow of news to a small audience. Facebook is a hot social network drawing its own set of "Facebook optimizers." Mahalo is an already-failed experiment being rehashed by Calacanis. Scoble thinks he can conjure up the vision of a Google search killer simply by drawing meaningless lines on a whiteboard between these three sites and putting it on video. But he can't, and he doesn't.

All he's assembled is evidence, on video, that he doesn't understand tech, doesn't understand video, and doesn't understand himself. He's an expert, in other words, on exactly none of his three favorite topics.

At one point, Scoble says: "Where are we going with this? I don't know!" No one else does either. The most sensible explanation? Scoble's conducting a public job interview. Rumor has it that he's already tried to land a job at Facebook. But Scoble working for Jason Calacanis at Mahalo? The two will make a perfect pair: misinformed, contradictory, self-promoting evangelists who will do anything for the next buck.