I’ve previously profiled Memeorandum, and there are no major announcements or feature releases to spur this new post.
However, something much more significant is happening because of Memeorandum, and I am not the only person to notice it.
Robert Scoble, who writes about it often, says “Anyway, sorry that I am fawning over it so much. It’s just changed my life, that’s all.”
Dave Winer writes “I find it’s changed the way I think about blogging. Not many of these tech gadgets do that.”
If you don’t know about Memeorandum yet, check out the site and read my profile. Memeorandum is the “newspaper” for anyone interested in what’s happening right now in politics or technology.
Regarding my statement in the title of this post, I really do believe that Memeorandum is forcing a subtle but important shift in the way many of us use the web.
Memeorandum finds blog posts, newspaper articles and press releases that are being heavily linked to in near real time and puts them up on the site. The position and size of the headline is indicative of its importance (determined by number of links and other factors, such as how much people are writing about the linked content). The higher up and bigger the headline, the more important it is. And linking sites, the conversation, are clustered underneath the headline.
This means you can find out in near real time what is important in technology (or politics), how important it is, and who’s talking about it. If you then post on the subject, you will be linked into the discussion as well.
If I have limited time and I need to find out what’s going on, I turn to Memeorandum. I am on this site at least 15 times a day. I am finding that reading feeds in my reader (the old way I used to find out what was hot) takes much longer, has a much longer lag time, and significantly more noise (Memeorandum has virtually no noise – everything is relevant).
So Memeorandum is changing my reading behavior, but it is also changing my writing behavior. It is much easier for me to find and read everything that is being written about a topic (Memeorandum also includes links to the real time search engines for additional material). I find that I am more educated on the topics I write about, and am writing more often about things the web feels are important at the time.
It’s a damn ugly site, but it is the most useful tool I have to discover real time content on the web.
It is cool. I like getting the feed and sometimes I just scan the site to see what is being talked about and linked to less often then the rest. This gives me insight to the long tail.
With all relevant posts gathered around a topic I think it helps writing. Either I avoid a topic because everyone is already talking about it. Or I do talk about it on a better level because I’ve sat back for a minute and read all relevant posts.
Thanks for pointing out this site again. The first time I dismissed it because of the poor UI but now I am really starting to love it. It is just one of the best sites to quickly scan the major headlines.
Memorandum is great, but viewing its contents via my account at SearchFox integrates the posts into the feed reader by placing them in the order of priority to me. This prioritization and integration with other RSS feeds that I follow works best for me.
Ri Rove Remorandum!
If I’m correct, Google.com applied for a patent back in 2003 that rank headlines in real time using the same methology described above. There were blog coverage on the patent several months ago.
I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I think memeorandum looks just right.
Can’t agree more. I used to use Digg to find breaking news, but memeorandum is so much more accurate.
I agree. Memorandum has definately changed the way I browse through the blogs these days.
I have to say tech.memeorandum is the best place to find what is hot in the technology in blogosphere. I have stumbled upon several new and interesting blogs through “Related Items”.
UI can definitely improve. I think it looks ugly because of color scheme. Data presentation and organization is fine.
I’ve gotten different experiences out of the original political version, and the later twin technical/political versions.
The political versions exposed groups who were trying to advance different sides of the same stories. Once a significant number of blogs picked up on something the commercial press missed, it entered this sort of bifurcated public debate.
The technical version, though, exposes and highlights the people who talk about themselves. I’ve been a little dismayed at the groupthink, the reinforcement I’ve seen there. I didn’t expect this… thought I’d learn more from a tech subset than I actually have.
Link-analysis is the key technology, and it’s a valuable one. I’m not sure we’ve reached the best usage so far yet, though.
Well, sorry. I have problems with Memeorandum. If you want AMERICAN politics, maybe it’s great. If you want Tech news, maybe.
It just seems so opaque and so fixed. I went looking for the settings so I could tweak it towards my interests.
But no, I can have US national politics (Coburn anti-pork measure anyone in Europe?) or 2.0 West Coast Tech, but anything else aint on the radar.
It’s not that it’s a bad tool, but it’s like only having a hammer in your toolbox – not much use for most jobs.
It would also be better if there was a bit more information about what and how the information sources are chosen and sorted. How can you trust the system when you don’t have a clue where it’s coming from?
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Megite is the newspaper for anyone interested in what’s happening right now by intelligently uncovering the most relevant items from thousands of news sites and weblogs. Try it at http://www.megite.com
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The political versions exposed groups who were trying to advance different sides of the same stories. Once a significant number of blogs picked up on something the commercial press missed, it entered this sort of bifurcated public debate.
The technical version, though, exposes and highlights the people who talk about themselves. I’ve been a little dismayed at the groupthink, the reinforcement I’ve seen there. I didn’t expect this… thought I’d learn more from a tech subset than I actually have.
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