Richard MacManus had an interesting reaction to a new service that ranks the top sources for tech news aggregator Techmeme. He talks about how many successful blogs, including his own, have evolved into media companies:
“Nothing illustrates the current ‘new media’ landscape more, for me personally, than the fact I spend more time these days running this business than blogging. The bigger, and far more important, picture though is that the top (and aspiring) blogs have evolved into media companies. It’s almost comparing apples to oranges to compare Techcrunch to Scripting News, or Read/WriteWeb to Fred Wilson’s blog – even though we may write about the same things often.”
“Lastly, to the most extreme position yet stated (always a good way to get Techmeme juice!). Robert Scoble thinks the Techmeme Leaderboard may herald “the death of blogging”. But let’s be honest, it’s been “dying” ever since social networks like MySpace and Bebo came along – which is where many young people do their personal blogging these days. And now it’s Twitter for a certain tech-centric part of the blogging population.”
“But one thing hasn’t changed and hopefully never will – the best bloggers are passionate about the topics they write about, and they are informed and opinionated. All the writers on Read/WriteWeb have those attributes. So even though we’re not a blog, we’re still bloggers ;-)”