I love Techmeme and its sister sites - really, I do (yes, Gabe, I mean that). But best I can tell it's like an exclusive country club because it excludes the vast majority of the world's bloggers who write in other languages. These include many huge bloggers who write about tech - particularly in Germany. Further, 60% of the world's blogs are not written in English.
Here's a case in point. Yesterday, some 85 bloggers from France, Germany and Italy linked to one of my posts and it only registered on Techmeme once some heavy hitters wrote about it. I could care less if I make Techmeme, truly. I am grateful every time I am included. But I find it incredulous that a blog post about blogs that spurred such in-depth conversation was ignored outside the country club.
This is indicative of a larger trend, perhaps embedded in American culture. We don't care about what the rest of the world is blogging about because it's not in English. That's too bad. This is a global conversation and we're missing a lot of voices. According to an Edelman analysis, the top 10 US blogs linked to each other 3,302 times over the last year. They never link to bloggers in other countries and rarely do they even link to non-US media. Michelle Malkin is the rare standout who does. We'll have a lot more to say about link analysis in the top 100s in the next few weeks.
Language is a barrier, but it can be mitigated. We need better on the fly translation tools. If Bloglines and Google can transcode links into mobile-friendly formats on the fly, we should be able to do the same with translation (even though it comes out sounding like Yoda, as my colleague Björn Hasse reminds me.)
Now in Techmeme's case, a ping server would solve this issue. Then Techmeme could be more inclusive. Right now it feels like a little exclusive club and that's a big turn off.
Tags: techmeme
