Techmeme’s Front Pages: What’s Really A Big Story & How To Go Back In Time

I love Techmeme, absolutely adore it. But
this entire
Rocketboom thing illustrates a weakness, how a big story can crowd
everything out. Take a look:

For the record, I never watched
Rocketboom. I started hearing more about it in the past few weeks and
thought maybe I might check it out. Amanda Congdon’s name I’d heard vaguely in
various posts across the blogosphere that I’ve read in the past. Andrew Baron?
Didn’t ring any bells. But heck, I’m sure my name probably doesn’t ring any
bells with Amanda and Andrew either.

So for me, Amanda and Andrew’s split is a non-issue, but one that’s sucked
the life out of a news source I depend on, relegating all else into "in other
news" below-the-fold status. Annoying.

Then again, perhaps this is good. Perhaps this helps me realize this really
is a big story given how many bloggers are talking about it. Certainly seeing
Techmeme light up like this when Robert Scoble left Microsoft or Bill Gates
announced his semi-retirement made a big impact.

Perhaps. Or perhaps it’s just too much navel-gazing among the blogosphere
making something bigger than it is. I really don’t know, but I do love the
visual impact of how a Techmeme front page can reflect a big story, even if I
don’t always agree with it.

Sadly, I’ve never seen an easy way to scroll through "back issues" of
Techmeme. Maybe there’s an option like this out there. If you know of one,
please comment. Instead, you have to do it manually.

Look at the Techmeme page. Next to each major item, you’ll see a little paper
icon with a folded corner, like shown below:

Click on that. Doing that brings up a snapshot of the page, jumping you
directly to that particular item, so you can see how it looked back in time.

For example, here’s the
snapshot for the
current Rocketboom look on Techmeme. And over on the right-hand side, you’ll see
the time and date of that page, like this:

Now go back to the home page. Down at the bottom right-hand side, you’ll see
a box called "Archives," like this:

This is a fast way to drill back in time if you have
failed to bookmark a particular Techmeme page.

For example, Robert Scoble announced he was leaving Microsoft on June 11,
2006. So put that into the Archive box:

June 11, 2006

And you get this snapshot (I’ve included the entire page, so you really can
see the impact):

Wow, now that was a front page. Later that week on June 15, Gates made his
announcement, giving us this snapshot:

While I think Robert is great, you can see the navel gazing skew on Techmeme
with these two front pages. Scoble comments go on and on and on and on. Gates,
who actually runs the company Scoble was leaving, a hugely powerful person, not
to mention the richest man in the world, gets less than half the coverage in the
blogosphere. Here’s a side-by-side look.

But going day-by-day isn’t perfect, and Gates might have been bigger than
I’ve shown above, if I checked at a slightly different time during the day.

For example, Om Malik got big headlines when he said he’d be
leaving Business 2.0. That was on June 13, but the default June 13 snapshot is like
this:

Where’s Om? Here he is:

Same day, just in the morning at 8am. Twelve hours later, the default snapshot
that Techmeme gives for 8pm has Om no longer news. In fact, that story made
its last gasp at 7:55pm like this at the bottom of Techmeme:

What a difference a half-a-day makes

I’ll drop Gabe Rivera who runs Techmeme a note about the post. All these
great front pages are easy to recreate, if you know the exact time you want. But
I wish there was a better way to browse them, plus something that automatically
built a catalog of the top stories and front pages over time.

Postscript: See Gabe’s comments below, plus he’s also posted some more
comments in Time
travel and permalink HOWTO, plus why the huge clusters? on the Techmeme
blog.