Dave Winer writes that Techmeme is "officially" a cesspool, now that bloggers will write linkbait just to get on the Techmeme leaderboard. (Little-known fact: all search engines are also cesspools by the same reasoning.) Specifically, he singles out Jason Calacanis and Robert Scoble for writing attention-getting linkbait pieces (much like he himself is doing):

"I'm thinking of this idiotic post by an idiot [Jason] who's known for saying idiotic things just to get attention." #

"Scoble [...] is rapidly rising. How's he doing it? By saying extreme things that people will react to. Scoble ain't no idiot. If he wants to rise on the list, he rises." #

So Jason's an idiot, Scoble "ain't no idiot," and the verdict on Dave Winer, who fell for both bloggers' linkbait, is still out.

P.S. Dave - what's up with the tinyurl links? If you need more disk space on your server to handle all of the extra bytes needed by full-length URLs, I'll take up a collection to buy you some more storage.