Marshall Kirkpatrick has a post up at Read/Write Web about a relatively new blog-tracking and aggregation/filter site called Blogcosm, in which the creator of the service, a veteran geek named Scott Lawton — who claims to have been around even before Dave Winer invented blogging (which is just crazy talk) — talks about how he’s gunning for Gabe Rivera’s Techmeme.

I’m going to give Mr. Lawton the benefit of the doubt, because I’m a nice guy, but I have to say that his site competing with Techmeme.com is like me competing in a bike race with Lance Armstrong. At the moment, Blogcosm is a haphazard collection of blog info and rankings taking from other sites such as Technorati (which it might be able to compete with, given how far Technorati has fallen in the past year or so).

As for the design of Blogcosm.com — well, let’s just say that Techmeme may not be anything much to look at, but next to Blogcosm it looks like something that came out of Apple’s design lab. I mean, damn. I’ve seen sites that were designed using Microsoft’s PageMaker from 1998 that looked better. I agree that design isn’t everything (what we might call the craigslist philosophy), but still. It made my eyes hurt.

I think Techmeme is safe for awhile.

Update:

Please see my exchange with Scott in the comments below.