Darryl.net

After seeing all the trackbacks on the recent TechCrunch Apple iPhone post, I wondered if you could use the number of trackbacks as a measure of story importance. Are sophisticated blog readers essentially ‘voting’ for the events that will define the tech industry?

In The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki posits that ‘the crowd knows’ better than any individual expert. Especially if three conditions are met: Diversity, Independence, and Decentralization. On TechCrunch, readers work in different capacities for a diverse set of companies - but they’re probably all working in the tech industry. Most bloggers are making a relatively independent decision to write a post and link it to TechCrunch, and there’s no overarching authority over bloggers. Whether or not TechCrunch’s audience meets James’s requirements can be debated, but there’s some chance we can trust this data. Or is there? Let’s see the results:
I wrote a script to get the top 20 stories in terms of trackbacks since the dawn of TechCrunch time until around the Apple iPhone post:

1. Exclusive Screenshots: Google Calendar (365 trackbacks)
2. AOL Proudly Releases Massive Amounts of Private Data (246 trackbacks)
3. Google Has Acquired YouTube (202 trackbacks)
4. Completely Unsubstantiated Google/YouTube Rumor (186 trackbacks)
5. The State of Online Feed Readers (185 trackbacks)
6. The Online Storage Gang (143 trackbacks)
7. Web 2.0: The 24 Minute Documentary (135 trackbacks)
8. PayPerPost.com offers to sell your soul (128 trackbacks)
9. Comparing The Flickrs of Video (97 trackbacks)
10. Google Calendar is Live (95 trackbacks)
11. Digg Does The Acquisition Dance With News Corp. (93 trackbacks)
12. Digg 3.0 To Launch Monday: Exclusive Screenshots and Stats (91 trackbacks)
13. AOL-Netscape Launches Massive “Digg Killer” (90 trackbacks)
14. Yahoo.icio.us? - Yahoo Acquires Del.icio.us (84 trackbacks)
15. Companies I’d like to Profile (but don’t exist) (83 trackbacks)
16. Amazon: Grid Storage Web Service Launches (82 trackbacks)
17. Bill Gates On The Future Of DRM (80 trackbacks)
18. AllPeers Is The FireFox “Killer App” (79 trackbacks)
19. Comparing the Mapping Services (72 trackbacks)
20. Facebook Users Revolt, Facebook Replies (71 trackbacks)

I’ve bolded the ones that I think deserve attention, but I wouldn’t say this creates a perfect list. First of all, I can’t see how Google Calendar would beat out AOL opening its doors or Google buying YouTube - unless maybe, just maybe, people are desperate for a worldwide MS-Exchange-like system and we thought this would be the end-all be-all. More likely, there are many prolific bloggers working at Google who read TechCrunch. Second, the prominence of “The State of Online Feed Readers” and Digg articles leads me to believe that the people ‘voting’ with these trackbacks are not very diverse. Finally, AllPeers?

Nevertheless, we do see some of the bigger tech stories of 2006 represented here: the YouTube acquisition; Digg, Del.icio.us, and ‘web democracy;’ AOL opening its walled garden, and the immaturity of DRM. It would be interesting to run this script on some other blogs and see what happens… perhaps on another rainy day.