The Five Members of the Techmeme Family (so what are you?)

I’ve been an avid follower of Techmeme since Dec 2005, when Scoble evangelized it to me while I was working in Santa Clara at HDS. Ever since, I’ve been watching with great interest on how it changed, evolved, and content was added to it. Most importantly, it was interesting to see ‘who’ was being added to it. Over 2 years later, I’ve concluded there are only five different types of bloggers that end up on Techmeme.

When I refer to a “Major Node”, its the same as the textual style of a “H1″ heading or large heading that lead the page. Next, the smaller text is a “H2″ and then the dozens of bloggers in the “H3″. The lower the number, the larger the font, and the greater the prominence.

The Five types of publishers on the Techmeme site:

The Original: Often where the story or idea breaks, this is the first instance of the topic being discovered. Unfortunately, this person doesn’t always get the H1 spot as the lead node.

The Breaker: This can be mainstream news source or a mainstream blogger that discovers the story from the Original News Source and blogs it, as a result, they often become the top node, even if they arnen’t the original source. It seems as if some websites are natually geared to be an “H1″ even if they are resonators.

The Resonator: Also referred to as those who echo or copy, they repeat what was already said, adding little or no additional content, news or opinion. You’ll often see lines and lines of these in the H3.

The CounterPoint: This person often spins editorial the opposite way of the lead story, and takes the opposite viewpoint, exploring the downsides of any viewpoint. They often become and H2, and sometimes overtake the H1.

The Encapsulator: These bloggers often summarize the entire long thread of a discussion, listing out the point and counterpoints and nicely creating a digest for those late to the story can quickly catch up on.

In the end, most Techmeme contributors end up playing multiple roles (except for the breaker who will almost always gain an H2 or H1 regardless if their late to the story) and it’s a constant change.

So did I miss any other types of Techmeme members? So what type are you?

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 6th, 2008 at 7:42 am and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.