The latest craze sweeping the blogosphere is something I like to call "Bitchmeme" - or 'bitching about Techmeme'. Just as it was popular a few months ago to bitch about Digg (as I did quite a bit of) and the gaming of that site, Techmeme has become the new hotbed for gaming accusations (or anti-gaming gaming accusations) and claims that it is rigged.

I'll say flat out: I love Techmeme, it is a thousand times better at consolidating important tech news that any other site. Digg usually has most of the same stories, but things take so long to become popular there, that by the time most people see the "breaking" stories, they are old news. You could wade in and try to find them, but that's getting harder and harder as Digg keeps getting bigger with more stories submitted. Using a feed reader is also obviously a great resource, but again there is too much information to sort through most of the time to make it worthwhile if you only have a few minutes to find the biggest stories.

There seem to be a couple main problems people have had recently with Techmeme. The first is that there are the so-called 'A-list' bloggers who make the headlines, and then the 'B-list' and sometimes 'C-list' who simply write a quick summation of that headline and get in the discussion section of Techmeme. Being squarely in the 'B-list' myself I can certainly understand this complaint. It is true that a lot of my information does trickle down from A-listers, but I do make it a point to try and give insightful (or at least opinionated) remarks in the stories I write about. It's also true that I may not break much news, but I simply haven't had many opportunities to do that yet. I hope that will change in the near future as I continue to grow, but for now I see it as basically my insights into stories that is making my site.

There are also plenty of times when I'll write on something well before a larger site will, but my story won't make it to Techmeme, while one of the bigger sites will come along and get a headline without having any links incoming yet - Louis Gray has noticed this as well. I have no real problem with this as the bigger sites have usually earned their status and reputation, and if Techmeme wants to stay relevant with breaking news, they have to give a few sites some benefits in putting their stories up quickly.

I'd love it if Techmeme would develop a 'backpage' of sorts where some of us "B-listers" who are on Techmeme everyday under the headlines, could have a chance to have some of our other tech stories showcased. If you didn't want to read it, you wouldn't have to, it would be a wholly separate page from the main Techmeme page and I think it could produce some very interesting stories - and could alleviate some of the complaints people have about a few sites having total control.

The second complaint about Techmeme that is starting to creep up is that the "A-listers" are being paid off by PR firms and the like to essentially game the influential tech site. This accusation is very similar to accusations that were made about Digg last year (a debate I was very much in the middle of as a top-20 Digg user at the time).

This I'm not too sure about, but I tend to agree with my fellow "B-lister", Steven Hodson, here that it seems unlikely that a site like TechCrunch (which is mentioned numerous times in the Geek News Central story) is attempting to game Techmeme for profit (both Mike Arrington of TechCrunch and Robert Scoble of Scobleizer left comments in Steven's post denying the accusations made about their involvement in any such activity). These sites are usually pretty good about disclosing things and being upfront (look at Mashable's post about their internal linking policy today) - if any of them got caught doing this, it would be game-over in terms of their credibility. That seems too big of a risk to me for what are already huge sites.

Personally, I'm getting more and more PRs and heads-up emails sent to me asking me to write about launches or products. As it's only me writing on ParisLemon, I sometimes do a few, and I usually take the ones that I find interesting or would use (hence why things are for the most part positive). There have been a few that have offered money (update: going over my emails again I've never been explicitly been offered cash, though it has been implied and I have been offered other gifts - none of which I followed up on) to write about them, but I have not taken those assignments - nor would I, as I made the decision a while ago that I was content to pull in some money from solely from advertisements. After checking out Pay-Per-Post and the like months ago, I ultimately deciding against that route but I don't have anything against sites who do that as long as they use disclaimers.

It would seem to me that a lot of this suspicion about gaming Techmeme started right about the time Techmeme introduced their Top 100 leaderboard. While this seemed to be a feature to take on Technorati, it was also a bit questionable because the good of such a list (having a solid list of blogs to subscribe to in your RSS reader) could also bring out some bad things (gaming). In fact, Digg was forced to remove their top user list after accusations of gaming became too great and a few instances were exposed.

The fact of the matter is that Techmeme is a great site in which the positives far outweigh any negatives. If you don't think the discussion sub-areas bring anything to the table, don't read them. If you think the "A-listers" are gaming the site, don't read them. If something like that is true (which, again I don't believe), it will eventually come out and they'll be screwed, but Techmeme will live on.

I would love it if all this bitching about Techmeme could be taken off of Techmeme's frontpage and instead put on a new "Bitchmeme" site - we're getting to the point where that almost seems viable. It's great that Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera doesn't shy away from the criticism and leaves the stories up there for all to see (which would never seem to happen with Digg), but it's to the point now where these stories are taking up valuable real estate from actual tech news. Lets keep the frontpage of Techmeme on the tech tip and leave the self-reflection for "navel-gaze" Sunday.