Ben Ruedlinger’s Blogniscient relaunched today with a completely new look and feel. An old screenshot of the service is here.
Blogniscient is a blog news organizer that, like Memeorandum, uses a propreitary algorithm for determining what’s hot in the blogosphere at any given time. Unlike Digg, which creates news items based on user bookmarking and subsequent voting to determine front page items, Blogniscient and Memeorandum are automated.
Another similarity: both have hard to remember, and difficult to spell, domain names. 
Memeorandum has two verticals currently: Politics and Tech. Blogniscient has five: politics, tech, sports, entertainment and business. Blogniscient also has an “all category”, and additional tabs for “top blogs” and “freshest stuff”.
Memeorandum does not rank blogs publicly. They include new content on the top right area of the site, and additional new content on the bottom left. Memeorandum also includes older content that has fallen from the main area, on the bottom right of the site.
Blogniscient just posts a link and summary of top articles. Memorandum goes two steps further - showing blogs that contribute to the discussion, as well as a permalink for the entire discussion group. For instance, Blogniscient’s new launch is the top story on Memeorandum right now, which you can see by clicking here, even after it’s fallen off as stale news.
Memeorandum appears more transparent in their ranking because you can actually see and link to blogs which have contributed to the discussion.
Memeorandum also can show news items from major publications like the New York Times, and press releases, as the main news items. Linking blogs are shown in the discussion area. I also find this to be a very useful feature.
Taking everything into consideration, I still believe that Memeorandum is a better service. I’ll use Blogniscient too, but Memeorandum has actually changed the way I approach the web - I spend more time on Memeorandum than any other website.
Nice comparison - I prefer Memeorandum too, but I think we’ve got to appreciate that these are two sites aimed at completely different audiences. Blogniscient covers a wide range of topics - Memeorandum, meanwhile, is useless unless you’re into tech or politics. Right now, I see Blogniscient as a more mainstream version of Memeorandum. And it now has a “newbie friendly” UI to match.
It’s a bit like comparing MyYahoo to del.icio.us - the techies realize that del.icio.us is more powerful, but the domain and the incomprehensible interface scares off most mainstream users. Delicious really needs a new UI and a new URL if it’s going to go mainstream - perhaps it will move to delicious.com after all.
Pete, these are fair points. I assume Memeorandum will be releasing new verticals though.
Let’s let the web decide who wins over time.
Did you check out the cluster view on blogniscient? It’s on the left nav bar under preferences, lets you see related posts as well.
Eran, No, I didn’t see that before. That makes it much more like memeorandum. I don’t see the depth of discussion yet though (let’s see if that expands over time). The headlines on Memeorandum still look more “relevant” to me as well.
Either way, both sites are great. Memeorandum needs a redesign desperately.