memeorandum

memeorandum is a website that tracks current blog coverage of technology and politics. It’s an excellent resource for keeping up with these topics and saves you the time trying to sort through all the feeds from various blogs to find relevant information on these issues. For instance, here’s memeorandum’s coverage of yesterday’s Yahoo! Maps launch. For a more detailed analysis of memeorandum, check out TechCrunch’s write-ups (here and here). Even big media is starting to take notice. A couple of weeks ago Ryan Singel wrote a story on memeorandum for Wired News: “Cliff Notes From the Blog World”

memeorandum was created by Gabe Rivera, who often posts updates and information on how memeorandum works on blog.memeorandum.com. Here are Gabe’s three goals for memeorandum:

1. Recognize the web as editor: There’s this notion that blogs collectively function as news editor. No, not every last blog on Earth. Tapping the thoughts of all of humanity uniformly would predictably lead to trivial, even spammy “news”. But today there are rather large communities of knowledgeable, sophisticated commentators, (and yes) even reporters writing on the web, signaling in real time what’s worthy of wider discussion. I want memeorandum to tap this signal.

2. Rapidly uncover new sources: Sometimes breaking news is posted to a blog created just to relate that news. Sometimes the author of the most insightful analysis piece at 2PM was a relative unknown at 1PM. It happens. I want memeorandum to highlight such work, without delay.

3. Relate the conversation: Communication on the web naturally tends toward conversation. It follows from human nature plus the Internet’s immediacy. Blog posts react to news articles, essays reference editorials. And links abound. Yet most news sites do very little to relate the form of conversations unfolding in real time. Some seem to deny that a conversation is even occurring. I want memeorandum to be a clear exception.