In less time that it takes a hooker to stroll her corner the new Techmeme Leaderboard has in the words of Dave Winer … become a cesspool where the past masters of link baiting have risen to the challenge to claim their spots at the top of this newest popularity metric.

Dave is a little more blunt in pointing out the main “idiot“  responsible for the most recent attempt to game the new system by proclaiming to know what Web 3.0 is all about; which is incredibly stupid when the whole concept of Web 2.0 is questionable to begin with. On the one hand we have Rex Hammock who thinks that Web 2.0 is nothing but nonsense and then on the flip side there is Stowe Boyd who suggests that while we might have inklings of what Web 3.0 might it doesn’t include the inane ramblings of someone like Jason Calacanis using the terminology to flog his newest shiny thing.

So while Jason is out there prostituting himself with intentional flame bait phrases to climb the Leaderboard and Scoble is being his usual attention seeking self in order to play tag with Jason on the Leaderboard climb to the top, we have a ranking system that was already heavily weighted to the big names in the blogosphere being further perverted for nothing more than assuaging egos.

Even though Scott Karp tries to offer some serious suggestions to the Techmeme team to help combat this totally expected bastardization of well meaning intentions the fact is that it took less than a day to totally fuck up yet another metric. While some of the comments on the various posts call Dave Winer a jealous whiner and that the Leaderboard is still inherent valuable are missing the point.

Any metric is only as good as the data it is representing. the moment you have even one person screwing with that data; whether just for fun (yuk yuk) and to enhance their own standing the whole metric becomes suspect and borderline useless as an even close representation of what is happening in the blogosphere.

Listening to: David Arkenstone - Atlantis - The Gardens Of The Citadel

Conversation Tags: Techmeme Leaderboard, Dave Winer, metrics