I wish TechMeme had an item-level opt-out
Wednesday, October 24, 2007 by Dave Winer.
Of course people would like to have an item-level opt-in, to guarantee a post would earn a top position on TechMeme, but obviously that's impractical, so why not give us the power to say please don't include this story in TechMeme, it's too meta. 
When I say a piece is too meta, it's not news, it's news about news, what the Big Media guys call a process story. For example, I would prefer to not have this piece, the one you're reading right now, on TechMeme. It's now meta-meta, because I'm talking about the meta-ness of the piece. You can see this could go on forever, now I'm in meta-meta-meta mode. For a brief moment I went into quadruple meta mode. (Sometimes I get so deep into a joke I wonder if people are still with me.)
Seriously, some pieces just shouldn't be on TechMeme. And I know which ones those are. So instead of making me turn off the TM spider for my whole site, why not give me a way to say "Stop TechMeme spider, this item is off-limits." We could come up with a TechMeme namespace for RSS 2.0. I'd be happy to help. 
