Technorati Explore Smells Like Memeorandum
Michael Arrington
15 comments »
Whoa. Niall Kennedy nonchalantly wrote earlier today about Technorati’s version of Google Labs, called Technorati Kitchen. It’s where Technorati is putting it’s not-fully-baked beta products.
There’s only one project there now, and it’s called “Explore“. Explore sure looks a like it was inspired by Memeorandum:
Explore
Find out what bloggers are saying right now on any topic, organized by how many links their posts are getting. Think of it as a newspaper front page for any subject. Give it a try!
Explore is broken out into multiple categories, including Business, Fashion, Gadgets, Tech and many more. A quick look at Tech shows a very Memeorandum-like interface.
Posts are listed according to links in (just like Memeorandum), and links are clustered underneath the headline (just like Memeorandum). Technorati Explore is a really interesting way to see how popular blog conversations are clustering (just like Memeorandum).
Here’s what Explore doesn’t do as well as Memeorandum: It’s nowhere near as real-time as Memeorandum (although Technorati is indexing the entire blogosphere whereas Memeorandum only indexes a few thousand blogs). Also, Memeorandum is advanced enough to cluster related items even when they don’t necessarily link to eachother - Technorati doesn’t do this. Finally, Memeorandum includes news items (NYT, etc.) and press releases as headlines, which Technorati isn’t doing.
Here’s what it does better than Memeorandum: It works for any tag - just search on http://kitchen.technorati.com/explore/[TAGNAME], whereas Memeorandum today only has sites for politics and technology. Also, Technorati automatically includes all blogs in the conversaiton, whereas Memeorandum only includes its few thousand indexed blogs. With Technorati, even the smaller bloggers can get in on the conversation.
This is not as addictive as Memeorandum. Gabe Rivera, the founder of Memeorandum, has put together an incredibly perfect interface that just keeps drawing people to his site. But its the first real competition I’ve seen in this space.
I agree with you, Mike, Gabe hasn’t got much to fear from Technorati at this early stage. I see you didn’t mention how you totally dominate Explore’s default result set!
“an incredibly perfect interface”
Not even close, even if there was such a thing.
Memeorandum is butt ugly in my opinion.
At least Memeorandum works. Unless I’m mistaken, http://kitchen.technorati.com/explore/ looks broken right now - granted it’s beta, but functionality trumps prettiness. Or it should.
It seems to be really offtopic too. I tried a few different tags and topics and while the blogs the posts were coming from were often related to the topic, the actual posts I were seeing were not.
If you search for a tag/topic that doesn’t exist, it says it can’t find blogs tagged as ‘topic_here’.. which leads me to think it’s tagging blogs generally, rather than giving you the proper content on the topic. This would mean the normal Technorati tag view is still a lot more useful..