What Should Techmeme Use for Sources? (Poll)

I have read a post by Fred Wilson on his blog initiating a new discussion about what Techmeme sources should be and why Techmeme should include blog comments into account instead of focusing on blog posts (and articles on mainstream media websites) only. Fred not only encourages Gabe Rivera to include comments in the sources but he actually puts the question as "When Will A Comment Be Treated Like A Post On Techmeme?". So it's not even the matter of why not but a matter of when.

While I do agree 100% that comments often contribute to the discussion much better than individual blog posts that get to Discussion sections around various posts on Techmeme, I see a number of major difficulties for this.

Quantity

First of all, I imagine there will be simply a matter of quantity of sources that Techmeme algorithm will need to analyze - so if a post makes it to Techmeme as a lead or as discussion, Techmeme will need to also analyze all the comments that readers submit to this post. And given the mere number of comments a post receives on a major blog like Techcrunch or ReadWriteWeb, it will simply mean a huge new load of content to crawl and analyze.

Relevance

Normally when a comment is submitted to a blog post, it is generally relevant to what the post discusses. So does that mean that every single comment will have to make it to the Discussion section for the lead post? I think it is too much and we will simply fail to notice any other blog posts that discuss the same issue at hand from other points of view.

Links

As far as I understand Techmeme algorithm (which is not good, of course, since it is not all that open), a position for any news source depends heavily on how many posts on other blogs link to it. And do you as a blogger often link to someone's comments on other blogs (or even on your own)? And if Techmeme takes into account the links to the comments to add it to the Discussion section, where is it supposed to get the links to that comment from?

These are the issues I see and I believe there may be others as well, especially with bloggers fighting for a good position on Techmeme Leaderboard - probably some people will be concerned over losing their voice to blog comments.

Lately we have discussed Techmeme sources a lot noticing mainstream media climbing to the top of the leaderboard. We hear voices prompting for Twitter posts and FriendFeed discussions to be included on the list of Techmeme sources as well. So I have decided to do a small poll here to see what our readers deem as valid news sources that Techmeme should use. I don't think that Gabe will have to do anything based on our opinions here - after all, it is his product so it is up to him to make decisions on its further development. But I invite everyone to take part in the poll anyway since I believe it will be interesting to hear what people think anyway.

Poll: