It’s also worth noting, as I noted on Intermedia, that the New York Times does have somewhat of a history of killing tech memes. Bill Wasik, “creator” of flash mobs, credited the NYTimes with helping to kill off the fad in his essay on the subject for Harper’s.

I found that a reference on TechCrunch beat a spot on Techmeme by a considerable margin. The New York Times might be sobered to learn therefore that (anecdotally) the referrals heirarchy seems to go (1) TechCrunch (content written by Mike Arrington); TechMeme (an algorithm written by Gabe Riviera); (3) New York Times (350 full time reporters and 40 photographers, says Wikipedia, and that includes some of the most expensive columnists in the business).

I’ve been featured in the NYT and it drove about 250 visitors to Mike Industries. I’ve also been on the front page of TechMeme for almost an entire day and it drove about 400 visits. Then, I make the front page of Digg and it’s like 20,000. And Slashdot, more like 70,000. Mainstream America is just so much less apt to flock to web properties on a moment’s notice than the geekerati. On the negative side, it makes me think that techies are still much quicker to learn about new things than mainstream America, but on the positive side, it makes me think that we are only beginning to scratch the surface of peer influence on the web.