Techmeme, Google Blog Search and How to Put Both to Work for Your Blog

Techmeme and the New Google Blog Search

A number of tech blogs have already covered the news: Google Blog Search now has a meme-tracking feature similar to Techmeme’s. For those of you not familiar with Techmeme, take a look at the screenshot below:

Techmeme takes blog posts from top tech blogs and features them on the site. Each featured posts appears as a headline followed by a short blurb; the headline links to the featured post. Posts on other blogs that link to the featured post are listed below the featured post; these posts can “graduate” to featured posts if other tech blogs start linking to them. Featured posts that get a lot of links “bubble up” to the top of the page.

Techmeme’s arrangement makes it easy for readers to track the top stories in the tech world and follow the blogospheric conversation about a specific story as blogger write about it, all while minimizing the link chasing you have to do to follow a meme. If tech isn’t your thing, there are a handful of sites built on the same engine, but focusing on different topics:

• Ballbug for Major League Baseball
• memeorandum for politics
• WeSmirch for celebrity news and gossip

Google Blog Search has been relaunched with meme tracking — if you visit its main page now, it should give you a strong feeling of Techmeme deja vu. Here’s a screenshot:

Google Blog Search does Techmeme-ish meme tracking of blogs along 11 categories:

• Business
• Entertainment
• Movies
• Politics
• Science
• Sports
• Technology
• Television
• US
• Video Games
• World

How to Put Both to Work for Your Blog

A number of the posts written about Google Blog Search’s new Techmeme-like functionality have asked the question “Is Google Blog Search a Techmeme killer?” If you’re Techmeme creator Gabe Rivera, Google or someone who makes money off either, it’s an important question.

However, if like most of us, you’re not one of those, the real question is “How can I put both to work to get more people to read my blog?”

The answer is simple, and it’s an idea I had when I first launched Global Nerdy. Since that thought-stealing rat-bastard Jason Calacanis has secret Mahalo-powered mind-reading technology and put forth the same idea at the Blog Business Summit back in 2006, the world thinks he came up with it.

It’s a simple five-step plan originally for using Techmeme; the same trick should work with Google Blog Search:

1. Go to Techmeme and Google Blog Search.
2. Blog something intelligent about their topmost stories.
3. Link to and mention all the people who have said something intelligent.
4. Repeat for 30 days.
5. Go to a couple of conferences a month.

You can skip the conferences step if it’s too rich for your blood; the first four steps, which I haven’t been following as often as I should — have boosted this blog’s readership from the hundreds to the thousands.

Special Message to That Rat-Bastard Thought-Stealing (but probably nice guy to work for) Jason Calacanis:

I’m looking for work. Do you need an accordion-playing tech evangelist?