Techmeme becomes AppleGoogleMeme?

Techmeme comes up with their top 10 stories of the year - and 7 out of 10 are Apple or Google stories. The other 3 are TechCrunch (with an Apple substory), Friendfeed (ex Googlers) and eBay/Skype. How was such a monochrome palette selected - sez TM:

Techmeme has distilled its very own Top 10 story list, utilizing headline ranking data archived throughout the year. While we employ a terrific team of news editors to guide our story selection, this list draws on many factors outside our direct influence, making it a … nearly objective sampling of what was important in 2009.

Hmmm... to an extent what you get out of it depends on what you put into it. I've noticed that TM is biassing more and more towards mainstream sources, so maybe that is an explanation.

But even so - seriously - no Twitter, Hulu etc? Or the AT&T/4Chan and PirateBay stories that hit top spots on Digg? If I look at the traffic on our blog, we covered all the above stories and they were not the biggest runners (see here). Be interesting to see what the top runners on TechCrunch, Mashable etc. were.

One wonders about the exact selection criteria! (Update - Techmeme's Gabe Rivera has commented below, explaining its based on link count. That makes more sense as I suspect Google and Apple have more fanboi 2.0's than say Microsoft, but also - in my humble opinion - shows the risks of pure link based ratings)

Now I really like TechMeme, and am a great fan of its model, I've always seen them as a leading example of how media may work in the future - but the risk they run here is becoming Yet Another Mainstream Tech News Organ..... so why?

Does becoming a me-too storyboard system create sufficient value from the (hypothesized) increased volumes? One also therefore starts to wonder more deeply about how they are funded, and the implications thereof!