TechMeme (formerly tech.memeorandum) is a site that bloggers and others check frequently for news. It is an entirely automated web service that looks at what bloggers are talking about, and linking to, and decides what is news based on that analysis. In many ways it is an anti-Digg. Humans have no say in what appears on the TechMeme homepage, other than by blogging about it.

TechMeme is focused on technology news. It, along with sister sites Memeorandum (politics), WeSmirch (celebrity gossip) and BallBug (baseball news), is one of the more important technical innovations that has come out of the new web.

Tonight Gabe Rivera, the founder of TechMeme, just invented something else - advertisements delivered via RSS. NOT advertisements embedded withing RSS feeds, but actually using RSS as the delivery mechanism.

You can see the initial ads, which are for sale on TechMeme (details here), in the right sidebar on the home page of the site. The ads are also shown in the image to the left.

Advertisers send the ad to Techmeme via RSS (typically this would come from a blog, but any content would work). If the advertiser wants to change the ad, they simply change the RSS content.

Gabe explains his new ad unit in more detail on his blog here. I also like to get Jeff Jarvis’ opinion on new advertising models - it’s an area he’s become an expert in. His verdict? Thumbs up (and he wants them on his own site).

Our previous posts on TechMeme and Memeorandum are here.

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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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WeSmirch is a new celebrity gossip and news portal powered by Memeorandum. The technology behind Memeorandum will find the most popular stories from blog posts or news sites and cluster them together using a proprietary algorithm. What readers get is a single-page newspaper view of what the big stories are for a particular category and rank them accordingly, showing the stories as clusters of links from sources.

WeSmirch finds sources of news and aggregates the latest hot stories. WeSmirch picks up on stories relatively quickly, making it a good site to get your gossip fix without visiting a large number of seperate sites. It will also find stories that are potentially popular from much smaller sources and display them on the site. It has solved the problem of duplicates well and picks up those stories are the same or related even without the presence of links between the stories.

What regular Memeorandum readers will notice from tonight is that all three of the sites now powered by Memeorandum have included images within the story clusters. These images are taken from source articles and make the site look a lot better overall.

Tech.memeorandum has been a big hit in the blogosphere since it launched last November, and previously at Techcrunch we have written about Memeorandum and other sites in this category. Memeorandum has distinguished itself because it was one of the first in this field, and has managed to sustain a level of quality despite the best effort of others to spam the system.

Memeorandum creator Gabe Rivera’s policy to expanding the categories he covers has been to wait until there is enough interesting content for a particular category that people will actually want to read. The tech blogging community is very active with a large number of sources for stories and a constant news flow, but in other categories it is often harder to find what is popular algorithmically, to cluster a few sources together that are reliable and trusted and overall to keep a good flow of stories that are interesting.

This category is really heating up with more releases and more updates from the players in this field. The other sites that are tracking entertainment news at the moment are Megite and Blogniscient – I will leave it as an exercise to the reader as to which site does the best job of covering entertainment and gossip as it depends mostly on what your own preferences are.

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Gabe Rivera, the founder of Memeorandum, announces a slightly new look for his cult favorite site.

Since the September launches, I’ve heard a lot of reactions to the user interface, and the results have been mixed. The usability and functionality are generally appreciated, but the aesthetics are, just a bit too often, reviled.

“It’s hurting my eyes” goes the woeful refrain.

While I’m all about having the impact of memeorandum felt, I don’t really want to hurt your eyes.

So the redesign you see is aimed at just that. No major functional changes, just a general reduction in rate of eye injury.

I’m happy to see this update to the look and feel of the site. I’ve given Gabe my honest opinion many times that the previous design was hurting traffic - the first impression of many visitors was negative and they often fled the site before realizing how important Memeorandum is to the blogosphere.

I would personally have gone much further in the redesign, but its a good start and its certainly a cleaner layout.

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I’ve written about two new real-time news aggregators today, Megite and Newroo.

The space is clearly hot, with both funded and unfunded companies rushing to release products. The goal? Leverage all of the great edge blog content out there, figure out what’s hot at any given time by analyzing who’s linking to who (as well as other tools) and presenting that hot content to users.

It’s not easy to define this space. In general, I think the services that are focusing mostly on blog links are turning up the best stuff. Many of the services that Paul Montgomery listed in a post earlier this week don’t do this…they rely on user voting or other algorithms to determine relevance.

And Pete Cashmore’s post from yesterday didn’t capture all that I’ve found to date.

My list is below. These sites either use incoming links or story clusters (or both) to determine relevance, and show the linking/discussing blogs. I have written about many of these separately already. The others I will write about in the future if their features are or become interesting.

The List:

1. Blogniscient
2. Blogrunner
3. Blogsnow
4. Chuquet
5. Megite
6. Memeorandum
7. Newroo (pre-launch)
8. Tailrank
9. Technorati Kitchen
10. Tinfinger (pre-launch)
11. Topix.net
12. TruthLaidBear

The best? Still Memeorandum, but I love the experiments being tried by other services.

And something else: these services are going to start getting acquired by the big guys, if only for the brilliance of the engineering work behind the engines.

Update: And for more on Memeorandum and this space, listen to yesterday’s Gillmor Gang, which had a guest appearance by Gabe.

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Megite has been getting some attention on the Web 2.0 Workgroup email list as possibly the first company to be able to group blogging conversations as well as Memeorandum (profiles). The site is very rough design-wise, but is grouping things intelligently and seems to be popping popular stuff up to the top fairly quickly.

Memeorandum has redefined how early adopters get and digest their news. While these sites are still young, they will have a disruptive impact on the big guys, soon. Tailrank (profiles), another service in this space, is also doing interesting things, like analyzing user-uploaded OPML files for additional data and including a screen shot of the post/item under discussion.

For additional information on Memeorandum see this interview with Founder Gabe Rivera.

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There have been numerous 2005 “best of” and 2006 “predictions” posts over the last few weeks as the year comes to an end. I’m not going to write one of those. Giving out “best of” awards seems presumptuous to me, given that I’ve been blogging all of six months. And while predictions are fun, they aren’t all that useful in the end.

What I do want to write about as I reminisce about the year ending in a couple of days are the Web 2.0 companies that I love and use every day.

I’ve tested over a thousand products this year, and have written about hundreds. And while some of the companies I write about get very positive reviews, I find that the only true test of the value of a product is its staying power: do I continue to use the product, and maybe even pay for it, as the days and months go by?

So for those of you that are curious, here is a short list of the companies that have held my attention, and that I would not choose to live without on the web:

Bloglines

I have a love/hate relationship with Bloglines, but they’ve recently improved performance dramatically, and I really like that I can see the number of subscribers for each feed. This was the hardest one to include on the list, but at the end of the day I couldn’t leave them off.

Del.icio.us

I use Del.icio.us multiple times every day to store and retrieve bookmarks. I freely admit that there are better solutions out there and I may very well switch to one of them in the near future, but you have to hand it to Del.icio.us for inventing the social bookmark phenomenon.

FeedBurner

I love the statistics Feedburner provides on feed readership and has lots of advanced features that are important to me. And despite what I’ve written in the past, I know and trust the FeedBurner team. I just wish they’d get rid of the advertisement on my feed page.

Flickr

I enjoy Flickr more and more every day. I like seeing what my friends are up to based on the photos they upload as well as getting comments from others on my pictures. And I am starting to go back and upload old sets of photos from years ago. Flickr is just perfect.

Measuremap

The Measure Map blog analytics tool created by Adaptive Path gives me incredible insight into who is looking at what on TechCrunch. They need to deal with the speed issue for larger blogs though (it takes minutes sometimes to pull up stats, or just breaks).

Memeorandum

Memeorandum is how I keep up on the blogosphere when I don’t have time to read all of my feeds. It has also changed what I blog about, and how. Memeorandum is a cultural phenomenon.

Netvibes

Yeah, there are a lot of Ajax desktops out there, but Netvibes seems to stay ahead of the pack on functionality. The flickr stuff is great. Plus, how can I not love a service that includes TechCrunch as a default feed?

Omnidrive

I’ve been waiting for something like this forever. I forsee a day when a service like Omnidrive comes packaged with a new PC, or is offered alongside web email solutions. I’ve only had it for a few days, but I’m smitten. And fair disclosure: there are some awesome competitors out there, too, that I am just starting to look at.

Pandora

I listen to Pandora whenever I write - sometimes for hours a day. I’ve discovered countless new artists from it.

Skype

What can I say? Along with Vonage, Skype keeps my phone bills down to next to nothing, and it is an integral part of my everyday business and personal life. I would trade application sharing for the new video feature in a heartbeat, however.

Technorati

I use it more than Google. No one has launched anything better, yet. And they’ve made great progress in search speed over the latter half of the year.

Wordpress

I love Wordpress. Actually, let me rephrase that statement: I love Wordpress 1.5. Version 2.0 makes me want to throw my laptop out of the window. But it is an amazing piece of software, and all of my blogs run on it.

Yahoo Maps

I use Yahoo Maps because it allows multi-point driving instructions, something none of the others offer yet. This was incredibly useful when I had to attend three or four holiday parties on the same evening.

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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.

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Newsvine hasn’t launched yet, but the founder and CEO Mike Davidson has posted about what it will be once it does.

Newsvine will be a collaborative, social news site. Like other sites, Newsvine will show major news publications. However, readers can comment on news items, allowing for a discussion to ensue.

They are also adding tagging. Any user can bookmark a news piece (or any web page) with a tag such as “sports” or “Iraq” and it will become available at Newsvine under the URL newsvine.com/[TAG]. If you are interested in seeing news on a given tag, you can of course go straight to that URL as well.

Newsvine will use a voting system, like Digg, to determine how relevant a given news item is. I think these user-determined ranking systems, like Digg and Memeorandum, are a great way to push good content to the top. I’m looking forward to seeing this live. (Via Steven Cohen and Om Malik).

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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.

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