Tracking Major League Baseball coverage this year will be a little bit easier than before - Gabe Rivera is launching a Memeorandum site called BallBug today. BallBug offers a news summary, updated every five minutes, spotlighting the most buzzed about baseball stories and blog posts on the web. It’s like tech.memeorandum, but for baseball.
This is good news. I know a little about political news and celebrity gossip news thanks to Gabe’s other sites. Now I suppose I’ll be able to keep up with the baseball world, too.
What’s the next vertical site for Memeorandum? Gabe won’t say exactly, but from what I’ve seen, he’s a discussion follower. If blogs are talking about something and linking back and forth a lot, expect Memeorandum to be there eventually.
More on the Memeorandum blog.
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Ballbug looks nice, but I’ve been using striketwo.net for weeks. (And for all you NBA fans, lowpost.net is definitely worth checking out, as well.)
One thing I like about both striketwo.net and lowpost.net is that it reveals it’s sources — striketwo.net monitors over 675 baseball blogs (and ranks them, too, according to in-bound links from other baseball sites).
This is cool. I think this serves a great need as we continue to battle information overload. I almost stopped followed NBA until I found lowpost. I hope someone does this for cricket.
Hi Matt: yep, I’ve seen striketwo. I’m not sure how interesting the source list is to the typical non-blogging reader, but I think it has some other neat features (like logo tagging based on name extraction).
Still, what I’m aiming for here is a site that as comprehensively as possible surfaces what baseball bloggers are talking about, whether it’s written in the established media, or at MLB.com, or on blogs. I think Ballbug is unique in that capacity.
Well, I disagree with me, the ranked list is pretty interesting too.
Love it! I’m a huge baseball fan, so I think Ballbug is pretty sweet! Not to mention it is a timely launch with opening day today for most teams.
Maybe this is a silly question, but why was this limited to baseball? Wouldn’t it have been just as simple to open up to other big sports?
Congrats on the launch, Gabe. The site looks great.
memeorandum was a big inspiration for me in developing lowpost.net, but I would agree that Ballbug.com and striketwo.net serve somewhat different needs for baseball fans at this point.
If I liked baseball, this would be really cool. Since I don’t, it’s just cool.
But, I have passed around the WeSmirch site to the consumer women in my office, and they are hooked. So, building audiences one office at a time.
Do football (soccer)! purrrlease
I’m sure with the world cup coming up in June it will be a huge success and very relevant.
Cool. Where are the scores. What? No list of the yesterday’s scores? Then I’m not interested. There are certain things I still need actual news about, and not just filtered stuff. What if I’m an Indians fan (hint: I’m not), but no one blogs enough about Cleveland to get my team up on top of Memeorandum? Screw that, moving on…
Having looked at this a little closer, I think it’s only going to be successful if they allow filtering down to the team level. Baseball fans follow their own team obsessively and aren’t as interested in league wide news. At least I’m not. Need one for each team.
So is this thing totally automated?
If so, whats to stop someone from coming up with a better looking memetracker and squashing all these things Gabe is building?
#19 - I agree completely, good point.
#20 - The automation isn’t so easy.
#19, agreed. There is no way I can customize that site so that I can filter some teams (NY, BOS, SF) / players (Bonds, Jeter, Giambi, etc.) out as I just don’t care about them. Some one recommended StrikeTwo.net in an earlier comment and I agree. That is a much better site. Tech Crunch, you should have done a write up on them instead. RSS Feeds by team, by player, and overall, a great site.
We’re open to all discussions. But any meeting will have to be on the basis of withdrawing the First Job Contract. There have been five one-day public sector strikes in which millions of workers and students took part. An employers group has warned the protests are starting to hurt the economy. No Pasaran!
hi,
what kind of newsfeed software is used on these projects, is there a license available?
thanks
I’m not a big fan of baseball but to know the recent baseball news and updates I prefer ballbug, its nice informative site.