In the past 24 hours relevancy, the A-list, the Z-list, and blog "authority" are the hot news items. Right now there are two polar opposite approaches to this situation. Let's take the "traditional" approach first ... links.
Tech.memorandum is one of my favourite places to track who is talking about the hot issues of the day -- and even find them. But there is some (growing?) criticism that Memorandum is too insular, too tied to the "A-list" (don't know if I'm on the A-list, but I do show up there pretty often, still waiting for making the top spot though).
Now there is an upstart in Megite. Similar idea, but Matthew seems to be getting a few more interesting sites. He's also offering custom/personalized pages based on an OPML file you send him (on it's way to you Matthew). Megite is getting more of my attention lately. Still small number of readers according to FeedBurner ... but this could be a diamond in the rough ... a site just waiting to make it big. (Yes, I show up here a lot too).
Regardless, both these sites work on a similar principle. Find a topic, then track all the people linking to that article and related articles. Of course it is impossible to track all of the blogs talking about a topic, so the question will be who do they drawn from.
Technorati is working on a similar idea with its "authority slider" ... authority as measured by the number of other blogs that link to that blog. So Scoble is highest authority, my blog is a step down (I'm in the "magic middle").
This would be better than Tech.Memorandum or Megite because a niche site with lots of links on a topic might be able to garner significant traffic on that topic. I've only played a little with this tool so I can't give much of a review of it right now. The risk, of course, is that if you always keep the slider all the way to the right (a lot of authority) you will almost certainly miss cool stuff. (See also Techcrunch)
Now if we take this concept of authority and relevance and turn it on its ear, take the new site BlogCode. Mark, Scoble, and I have written about BlogCode ... Mathew should since he's on our lists ... and I see this as a new way to connect blogs and find blogs. You don't search with terms, you start with the blog. Then you see what blogs are most like it. Starting off, the rates are pretty much self-driven (you code yourself first), but as other people code your blog (essentially saying what they think your blog is about based on many different factors), the matches start moving and changing. I've watched my matches shift even in the last 12 hours. Of the folks above ... Scoble, Mathew, and I are all on each others' lists and I'm on Mark's but he's not on mine (I expect that to change). This is different because it isn't about linky-love. It's about content. It's about finding new blogs like yours (like Scoble, I've found a few new ones). I think this has a serious amount of potential in the future as most blogs are added to the list.
So, several different ways to track new content and find new blogs. One group based on who links to whom, another based on what you and others think you write about. Both important, both interesting, both exciting.
Tags: BlogCode, Technorati, authority, Megite, Tech.memorandum
