Scobleizer: Why don’t you use a memetracker?
Brian Sullivan
· 3 years ago
A better question to ask -- why would you want to use a "Memetracker"?
Michel Vuijlsteke
· 3 years ago
Um, because I'm not really *that* interested in up-to-the-minute updates? Because I don't feel like sorting the dross from the gems myself and because I trust the relevant links will tend to be picked up by the internet at large anyway?
Because I don't have the *time*?
Mike McBride
· 3 years ago
I don't use a meme tracker because I don't follow memes. I use RSS to track specific people and or websites that I have grown to trust as sources. The things they write about, the things they suggest, the ideas they have, are what I'm looking for, because if there's a big story or idea being thrown around as a "meme", I'll see it in one of those 230 or so sources, which are the sources I'd want to tune in to for their take on it anyway.
Jay Small
· 3 years ago
I follow digg and Memeorandum, but find the signal-to-noise ratio bad, especially in the RSS feeds. I posted an item (http://smallinitiatives.com/2006/02/08/on-newsv...) just this morning about how I was finding both digg and Newsvine increasingly boring.
rhm
· 3 years ago
Most of the time I want to read about something once. It's bad enough already that I read the same story on Slashdot, ArsTechnica, the Inquirer, a bunch of people's personal blogs and then several days later, BBC News Online. The last thing I want to do is find another 100 blogs talking about the same thing.
For a blogger the only use would be to decide what subjects NOT to write about - they've already been done to death....... unless you're a traffic whore of course.
scobleizer
· 3 years ago
Mike: I disagree. I find a lot of things in Memeorandum that I don't find in most other people's blogs.
Michael: interesting about the "time." I like Memeorandum because it saves me time finding the latest news.
Brian: for me it's about being informed. I want to know what's going on in the world. It's sorta like "why read a newspaper?" Or, "why read Google news?"
Same thing. I wanna know what people think is important.
Scott Royall
· 3 years ago
Because I can't get damn Technoranti to find my blog.
Sheesh, guys.
rsanheim
· 3 years ago
I read memorandum, among others, but I think it would really be more valuable if I could tell it what my favorite topics are and what I don't care about. Then filter the most popular discussions based on that, so I get even less noise to deal with.
re: digg - its fun for wasting time, but I don't go there for any sort serious discussion. Slashdot at +4 is much better for quality comments.
John H
· 3 years ago
a) Because it's arse-backwards.
By the time something's made enough links to get to the top of the page, and if I give a toss about it, I saw it yesterday already.
b) Because I'm interested in sites which tell me what's happening. I don't care what 25 random schmoes have to say about it after. Those few of the 25 I might want to see are in the trackbacks of the original, and there they have the advantage (missing from your sites) of containing an excerpt.
Otherwise what happens? See a sublink. Click. Oh, it's just a link to the other one with no comment at all. There's five seconds of my life I'm never going to get back.
So here's why I don't use them: I think they suck.
Incidentally, I also don't see what the big feckin deal is with endlessly cloning Blogdex/Daypop and calling it a business. [Yeah, I thought Blogdex/Daypop sucked too.]
"WEBTOOOO!" Yawn.
nicheplayer
· 3 years ago
Digg is the only "memetracker" I follow on a regular basis, and this started before it was a memetracker...I think.
I'm interested in the disparity in search results for "memetracker" between Google and MSN. How do you account for this?
lesliefranke
· 3 years ago
I agree with Michel. I just do not have the time. Most of the things I find interesting will show up in a handful of my Bloglines RSS feeds very shortly. What I do find myself doing some times is the reverse. If something comes across an RSS feed, that I find interesting, I may go out to Memorandum, Technorati, etc. to find out what others are saying and thinking about a topic.
Brian Sullivan
· 3 years ago
"I want to know what is going on in the world"
I don't see how tech.Memeorandum helps you there.
Except for lately (tech.Memeorandum seems to have changed in the last little while or I haven't been paying attention and it happened earlier), I found most of the information there was bloggers blogging about blogging and bloggers blogging about bloggers and blogging about ... well you get the picture. An echo chamber for bloggers.
As if blogging and talking about blogging was all there was to the tech world.
I have noticed though in the last few days that blogging related memes there seem to be a very low percentage (don't know if this is an anomoly or a trend). A trend I hope.
annezelenka
· 3 years ago
I use tech.memeorandum regularly, especially now that it knows who I am.
However, I can't use a memetracker to follow everything I want because none exists for the momblog space. I think it's a real lack. I've even considered developing one myself but I like writing about software better than building it. I'd love a mom.memeorandum.com that listed hot conversations about motherhood, like when an article appeared in American Prospect essentially saying that stay-at-home moms were failing the feminist movement. It'd have to use something like Stowe Boyd's conversational index to make sense of that domain, though, because linking across blogs is much more rare compared to tech.
Josh
· 3 years ago
The primary reason I've not used one is because I'd never even heard of a memetracker. I'm usually up-to-speed on geeky things on the internet, but I only just discovered Memorandum a week or so ago.
I still don't use it though, mostly due to reasons others have cited. I get the 'latest and greatest' via other feeds.
Example: I'm subscribed to the del.icio.us/popular feed. For a long time I was also subscribed to the main Digg feed. A few days ago, I unsubscribed from Digg. It was mostly just the del.icio.us/popular stuff in Digg format. Now, whether Digg stole from del.icio.us, del.icio.us stole from Digg, or if the stuff got to the top in both places by being genuinely interesting, I don't know (nor do I care).
The fact is, I was getting duplicate info, and it was a waste of time. I opted to stay with del.icio.us for one reason. In my feed reader, when I click on the item title for del.icio.us, I go STRAIGHT to the page that is being linked to. With Digg, I click on the link, end up at Digg's site, then I have to click the title THERE to get to the point of the link.
I get why it's like that (ad money, hello!), but fact is, it's one step I don't need to take with del.icio.us.
Anne Zelenka
· 3 years ago
The comment I left linked up to my wordpress.org test blog... nothing there to look at. I'm leaving another comment to see if I can get this comment linked to my real blog at www.annezelenka.com or if it will use my wordpress ID again.
Innocent Bystander
· 3 years ago
Because they are technical equivalent of circle jerks.
Group think machines.
Self amplifying feedback loops.
alicia
· 3 years ago
The hottest topics are often the least interesting to me. It's the tech (or political) equivalent of a gossip column, all buzz and rumor.
scobleizer
· 3 years ago
alicia: I totally don't find that to be the case. At least with Memeorandum. Most of what gets on Memeorandum is news about new stuff. Yeah, there's some buzz and rumor, but less and less over time as more and more bloggers get added. And, even when it is buzz and rumor it's nice to know what people find interesting enough to link to.
Martin Gordon
· 3 years ago
I follow Digg and del.icio.us, but not Memeorandum.
I think what turns me off from Memeorandum is that the sources are too official. Looking at the sources for the stories on there now, I see the New York Times, WSJ, ZDNet, et al. I prefer to get my news in a more distilled fashion by the bloggers that I subscribe to.
I absolutely hate visiting mainstream media sites because they're so full of crap that I don't really need. I have to put up with flash animations, banner ads, and registration pages to get to a perhaps half-way decent story that is split up into 6 pages for the sole purpose of increasing ad impressions.
Contrast this with the typical blog which may have an AdSense pane or two and perhaps even a couple of Amazon affiliate links and I can also get to full posts in at most one extra click. With blogs I subscribe to, the content-to-cruft ratio shoots even higher.
Jon Twernt
· 3 years ago
"By the way, Google only has 713 results when you search for 'memetrackers.' MSN has 2,943 memetracker results."
Also, if "memetracker" is a piece of jargon that's been coined recently enough that there isn't even a Wikipedia article for it yet (as of 4:14 PM EST) it shouldn't be surprsing that people don't know what you're talking about.
Phil Ringnalda
· 3 years ago
Too funny. MSN Search seems to have quickly revised their estimate downward, to 101 results, but when you get out to the page that should have result 101, instead of having one, or saying "no *more* results" it tells you that there are "no results for memetracker."
Also nice: while Google claims (at the moment, on the datacenter I'm hitting) to know of 710 results, it will only show you 62 of them unless you insist on seeing duplicates, at which point the 710 turns into "about 694."
Jon Twernt
· 3 years ago
"Also nice: while Google claims (at the moment, on the datacenter I’m hitting) to know of 710 results, it will only show you 62 of them unless you insist on seeing duplicates, at which point the 710 turns into 'about 694.'"
Google is screwing us again :mad:
jaseone
· 3 years ago
define:memetracker
No definitions were found for memetracker.
Like others here I've tried memeorandum and every time I read the feed it is all stuff I knew about yesterday or even longer ago, it is about on par or even behind Slashdot when it comes to breaking news.
Byron
· 3 years ago
Because by the time a meme hits I've already seen it, the meme headwaters are actually quite small. That and I'm really tired of web 2.0 this and web 2.0 that.
Richard Brownell
· 3 years ago
Scoble, I think you've known me to be honest and to the point before. The question you are really asking here is "what would it take to make you a memetracker user?"
The trouble is you are posing a question not to people who use other memetrackers, but to those who use none. The reason people don't use an entire type of technology is almost always exactly the same: "I have yet to see a compelling reason to use it."
So, the problem isn't that memetrackers need to have more results, prettier colors, different stories. If memetrackers want to catch on, they need to convince people that they are needed. There's no cut and dry answer for how to do that, particularly if the truth of the matter is that people really don't need memetrackers.
Mike
· 3 years ago
You do use fuzzy statistics so you can "make up" the conclusion that RSS is mainstream. So for most of us, this isn't so strange.
Gabe
· 3 years ago
Wow, this is great thread.
Paul
· 3 years ago
Well lets have a look at whats on there right now (8:37am 9/2/2006 AEST time):
"Prediction- Google-powered Star Office suite for Dell" Man am I sick of this crap, its been going around slashdot etc for ages
"2 Web Sites Push Further Into Services Real Estate Agents Offer" Hmmm might have some limited interest to me
"Google hires Amazon's search chief" Some tech company hires some guy. Whoop de doo
"Motorola Unveils Latest RAZR Slim Phone Z" Already read this a few days back on Engadget, Gizmodo etc
Etc etc etc the list goes on, I either don't care about it, or I've already read it somewhere else that had much better coverage of it. Sorry Scoble, you're wrong, its crapola. I'm more confused as to why you always bang on about it on this website...
Also, this misuse of the word meme really should stop. I don't hear bloggers calling themselves memeticians. All these sites do is track news, something which news.google.com does far better.
Jack
· 3 years ago
I read your post via RSS (thank goodness for full feeds) and popped over to mention the same thing as everyone else. "Memetrackers" are nothing but the echoes of old news. I don't read them for the same reason I don't go picking through the wastebaskets looking at old newspapers. Where is the discussion? Where is the "naked conversation" in it?
Laurence Timms
· 3 years ago
All of this stuff is absolutely fascinating - some really strong opinions.
> If memetrackers want to catch on, they need to convince people that they are needed.
Richard - I convinced myself that I needed a memetracker so I wrote chuquet.com primarily for myself. I've never really promoted it but a lot of people now use it. I often wish I knew what attracts them to it. It's not the colours, that's for sure :)
(nb I never called chuquet a memetracker until Robert Scoble coined the term - but personally I like it)
John C. Welch
· 3 years ago
What's a memetracker going to do for me that i'm desperately missing now?
I don't use bloggers for news sources, because, as you have illustrated on any number of occasions, bloggers are perfectly willing to not check facts, verify stories, etc, if it means being first. You, Robert Scoble, poster boy for blogging have said that given the choice between accurate and first, you'll be first and then apologize. You act very consistently with this.
As a result, I really don't take any "fact" or "news" you relay seriously at all. you're far too loose with the facts to be trusted even a little. About all your reporting is good for is a starting point. But you're entertaining.
The problem is, you're hardly unique, or even the worst of the bunch. so it really doesn't matter that some memetracker site has 3405143646 links to blogs on a story.
90% of them will all be circle - jerking like mad. 90% of the rest will get their facts wrong so that's what, 1%, maybe that will have a story worth looking at? Who has time for that BS?
I have a list I have created over the years, based on quality of writing and accuracy and depth of content. There's little a memetracker can do to beat critical selection of sources.
As well, they're nothing more than popularity contests. They aren't ranked based on quality of content, but on how many people like them. I left High School years ago, don't need a virtual version.
So I don't use them because they don't provide a useful service, and their rankings are BS.
Jason Pettus
· 3 years ago
I don't use memetrackers because I'm already a news junkie; I'm tracking something like 400 feeds a day on my own, and have discovered that the memetrackers rarely discuss issues I haven't already discovered on my own. What would be a lot more valuable to me would be if such places aggregated *what* people were saying about the topics, not just *who* was talking about them; if there was a simple line at the end of each topic, for example, saying something like, "Here are the people who think this news is good; here are the people who think the news is bad," or the like. This would get me to use memetrackers a lot more, to tell you the truth, if there was a simple way to see what people's opinion of the meme was as well, and not just the raw numbers of people talking about a given subject.
Guy Pelletier
· 3 years ago
Just like headline news, this allows you to get a feel for what is going on, you can always go to the source and yes, the news has been hashed several times before. Use it as a tool or use something else, information is power and how you get and digest it is your business.
leisa reichelt
· 3 years ago
well, i'm going to be one of the few to admit that up until a few days ago I had no idea what a memetracker was, and when I first heard of them, had the horrid suspicion that they were tracking the *other* things that people call memes (like that annoying 'four things' that everyone has done recently).
i've been giving memeorandum a few minutes of my day for the last few days and I'm more impressed than I thought I'd be. It would be good to see more diverse sources and more content, and a few hours spent on the interface design would be great... but I'll certainly be giving it a few more minutes of my day for a while yet I think.
Greg Hughes
· 3 years ago
Take one (important) step back. Ask anyone on the street what the word "meme" means, and what do you think their reply will be? Hint: be prepared to see a lot of blank stares.
Fundamentals first.
Paul
· 3 years ago
If you speak to an academic, where the word meme has been most commonly used, you'll get a totally different respose to what it is than if you speak to whoever coined this "meme tracker" phrase.
Another thing about Memeorandem - its very US centric from what I can see.
I'd like to know what the difference is between what memeorandem sets out to do and what news.google.com sets out to do.
Kevin Burton
· 3 years ago
Hey.
The space is still breaking. It's like asking "do you use an RSS aggregator" back in 2003. People look at you and wonder if you're insane.
Ask the same question in Q2 and they'll all be saying "Yup... I use TailRank" :)
Kevin
scobleizer
· 3 years ago
Greg: OK, call them blog news trackers, if you'd like. Or, just Internet News Sites. Heck, let's add Google News in here too.
scobleizer
· 3 years ago
Paul: Google News tracks "professional" news sites (or sites that at least have multiple authors and decent sized audiences). The other ones don't track just pro sites.
Lance Jones
· 3 years ago
Is it pronounced "mee-mee tracker" or "mehm tracker"? The word "meme" in French means "same". Is that the intended usage? (i.e., the number of sites that are tracking the "same" stuff?)
Jake
· 3 years ago
I thought I was disintermediating the media companies by using RSS in my own aggregator.
The two worst aspects of RSS and the blogus-sphere are the echo chamber and the republished press release (dittos). The memetracker is the echo chamber amplified.
jaseone
· 3 years ago
The thing is though that the target audience for these "memetrackers" are people that already use RSS readers and already subscribe to what they deem to be quality news sources & read them on at least a daily basis so why would they bother reading the same stuff in Memeorandum just in case something is mentioned that they haven't already read about?
If Memeorandum could magically list all the news that I care about then it could replace my list of feeds but that is never going to happen as my likes & dislikes are too organic and change too often for a web service to be able to meet that need.
Gavin
· 3 years ago
Nope, Becuase they focus so narrowly.
I care (due to what I work in) mostly about Biotech (i.e. not current news and not commputer/internet). For all areas not listed above, they are absolutly pathetic. They are worse than useless in that they essentially only pick up herbal supplement ads. I can look at my spam folder if I really want to read those. I don't have to blow more time to find that.
For info on those areas, I read the selected people (you being one) that I think may cover the topic in a coherent way (whether I agree with it or not).
Granted, I haven't looked at them in awhile, but they sucked so badly when I did that I have to be motivated to go back and check again. Somewhat akin to what joelonsoftware has to say about the internet calendars. He expresses my feelings in words better than I can....
Goebbels
· 3 years ago
"alicia: I totally don’t find that to be the case."
And alicia disagrees, Scoble, along with many, many others. What's your point? Everyone else is wrong? Or that you are the only one not exposed to this "news" in other places? Or that other people are better informed than you? Or that no one can disagree with you? (Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary!)
Jesus, man, accept it. Going back and forth: it does, it doesn't, it does, it doesn't doesn't get anywhere.
40 posts agreeing with alicia primarily and you being the rare exception (primarily) does demonstrate something however.
Don Dodge
· 3 years ago
Very interesting thread. I use Memeorandum, TailRank, and Findory every day. I have usually read the stories from other blogs I subscribe to, but the memetrackers help in the following ways; 1. They rank what stories are deemed important by bloggers. 2. They provide links to other bloggers perspectives on the same topic, 3. They include news stories from traditional sources not found in blogs. 4. It saves me time so I don't need to visit all these other sites.
Findory is the only one I have seen that personalizes the stories you see based on what you have read before, and what others like you have read. In the long run I think this will prove to be very valuable in focusing on a subject, and finding new related content that you might not have found otherwise.
I plan to ask Kevin Burton at TailRank for an interview next. I learned a lot about how these meme trackers work and why they are important by doing these interviews.
We are very early in the game, and we are the early adopters. This will be important in the future.
Don Dodge
Paul
· 3 years ago
If we are the early adopters, the feedback in here would suggest these things won't be important in the future, at least not in their current form. We should be easy to convince.
But hey, I'm sure in a year or so I'll be talking about how I always saw great promise in "memetrackers" or "cross advertising between news and blogs" or whatever we call it then :)
Brady Pennywell
· 3 years ago
The reason I don't follow them is that it promotes the old boy network of the blogosphere. I still enjoy coming across new opinions and not the same old same old.
scobleizer
· 3 years ago
Paul: the part I didn't say in my post is that when you do find a memetracker user they are EFFUSIVE with praise over them (and that often they tell you they check these things five to 10 times a day). It's interesting to see this disparity. I'm still not sure what it all means, but just the number of posts on this thread tell me there's some inate interest.
scobleizer
· 3 years ago
Brady: what's funny is I find more new sites on Memeorandum than I usually do on my reading of 800 feeds. Why? Cause when something new comes along and gets interesting it gets linked to a lot. Like Atariboy. Did you realize he wasn't even blogging three months ago?
russellreno
· 3 years ago
I started with Findory, then Memeorandum and now Tailrank. TR has the best of all the others.
Todd Van Hoosear
· 3 years ago
Lance, it's pronounced like "gene." Think of it as a memory gene. (Although Dawkins preferred the word mimic to memory, because, like genes, a meme is self replicating via mimicry, or repetition.)
The interesting things about memes and blogs, according to some, is that memetic evolution is screwing up natural selection something fierce, at least in humans. The meme, then, is threatening to replace the gene.
This doesn't just mean that more bloggers and nerds are getting laid these days, but that could be a nice added benefit.
As a PR guy, I'm interested in the influence that phrases and words and ideas have. Thus I'm fascinated by how quickly and widely a single blog post, for instance, gets linked to and referred to by other blogs.
Other than some of the specialization going on (e.g., Memeorandum in the political arena), I don't see what any of the sites listed above get me that del.icio.us/ popular or any other ranked blog search engine. There's a good list here: http://www.andreaswacker.com/memetrackers.html
Todd Van Hoosear
· 3 years ago
Oh, one more thing, speaking of search, someone please point me to a site that ranks blog search results by Technorati/Blogpulse/etc. rankings.
(i.e., I want to find who the most influential blogs are that write about a topic, not just the most recent or the most "relevant"--whatever the hell *that* means ... what *does* relevance mean anyway in search enging results, never took the time to understand that?--findings).
Michael Moncur
· 3 years ago
Reasons why I don't use a memetracker:
1. I read 150 RSS feeds and every time I look at Memeorandum, it's full of things I saw two days ago.
2. I'm not at all interested in news as a popularity contest. If that "4 things" meme had a centralized place to link to, it would have been at the top of Memeorandum - and it's not news, it's fluff.
3. They lack focus. Digg will promote anything about celebrities or Flash, and I'm not interested in 90% of what gets promoted. Tech.memeorandum claims to be focused, but let's face it: "tech" isn't a focus. Just about anything posted on a weblog can be "tech". And if I chose my own focus, "tech" wouldn't be it.
4. On top of everything else: I'm not in the habit of looking for new things to read. I've got work to do, and I'm already reading 150 news sources.
To me, sites like this are (a) a way to quickly "get up to speed" for those who aren't already plugged in and reading lots of weblogs, and (b) a way for RSS-crazed infomaniacs like me to find new things to read. The trouble is, I already have a great way to find new things (personal recommendations from those 150 people) that works far, far better.
Part of your problem is probably the terminology - "memetracker" means nothing to me. I'll bet there are more people on earth right now who have heard of Digg.com than know what the word "meme" means.
Peggy
· 3 years ago
No, I do not use or see the need for memetrackers: 1. Narrow focus 2. Much of it is old news 3. Circle, circles, circled linked 4. Not very useful 5. One, 'chuquet.com', gives me a headache just looking at it. The page is so busy :)
Stephen Duncan Jr
· 3 years ago
I agree witth the general reasons here. But I've gone on to describe what might get me to use a "memetracker":
Swim against the stream. I'm interested in deeper connection not necessarily more - not sure those fleeting past the top memetrackers offer a real way of filtering anything but most popular signal from the noise rather than most personally appropriate signal. For you Robert that might be appropriate - but not necessarily for everyone.
Doug Porter
· 3 years ago
Don't forget the startup being funded by Paul Graham's Y Combinator VC firm:
Well I poke in every once in awhile, but most often find I saw said info eons ago, but then I am the News Hound, I guess good for basic users who want a snapshot of the blog conversations, who normally don't have time to folllow the (mostly unproductive) eternally Nakedly-Devoid Conversations. I think in order for "memetrackers" to work, there needs to be a topical customization. Your own personal tracker, I could see that filling a market need. Like say wanted to narrow-focus on one particular field or tech. The big group-think ranking system, as it stands now, serves few outside of those that generate the group-think content itself.
Rob Bazinet
· 3 years ago
I guess the question in my mind is also "why" do I need one of these so-called, Web 2.0 memtrackers? They are just another idea that a bunch of bandwagon jumpers has put together in the hopes of getting rich? What is the real value? Is the information they carry really that important? Isn't the draw to many people to see if they can get on one?
Robert, didn't you just point out you were not #1 on the Wordpress list because some nobody got himself on the digg site..twice. They just seem like a huge waste of time.
Please post why we should be using a memtracker?
Just my 2 cents. Hey, it's early here I am just having my first cup of coffee.
Keith Patrick
· 3 years ago
I don't use it for several reasons. Mainly, I don't know what it is and assume that because you push it so hard, it has something to do with blogging, and honestly, I think blogging is overhyped, so I steer clear of the myriad of blog-related tools; it's simply too much to keep up with and not enough enthusiasm for what's out there. And also, I simply don't like installing software on my PC, as I don't run as an admin, and I don't like the crud that ends up on my system after installing 3rd party software
Brad Murray
· 3 years ago
I don't use any of the meme because aggregated RSS is more than good enough and I find it more personalized. I have bloglines on my browser and egress on my PocketPC. When I read something of interest and value I tag it in blinklist and delicious because I can't figure out which one I like better. Blinklist is a nicer overall app, but delicious has a much larger user base. It would be nice to have a single tagger for both of my profiles. I transform my recent Technorati tags with a custom script on my personal home page so it winds up working like a blog of my recently tagged items.
Christopher Coulter
· 3 years ago
Better to phrase it not 'why don't you', rather 'why you should'. "Why don't you", is too finger-wagging, too blaming, too negative. Tell them why they should. Evangelists job you know. :)
Alfred Thompson
· 3 years ago
Digg is the only one of those that sends me traffic. I don't use them because I don't care what "the Internet" thinks is important so much as I care what people I care about think is important. I read enough blogs that if it is important to me it will probably show up in one of those blogs in plenty of time for me.
Thomas Purves
· 3 years ago
Sigh, it's true if big media didn't exist, it Would have to be invented. When there is no scarcity of content it’s the filter that creates value not the content creators. Google created value by the results it *doesn’t* return. But this has been true forever, content creators have long been in the business of controlling the channel (manufacturing hits), not the business of making media. It’s all about controlling the top 40 rotation (and not more than 40) it’s all about constraining what gets distributed. The prize is massive, see that research piece linked to in boingboing, Slashdot today (http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/09/our_music_...) “Popular music gets that way because we're social animals who follow the leads of influential people and/or the crowd, liking what others like because they like it.”. but today, hooray! Big media control is crumbling to be replaced by?…
See doc searls again today http://doc.weblogs.com/2006/02/10#theSourceocracy and his long post on the tyranny of the Alist gatekeepers of the blogosphere. And memes become popular because they make the Alist, the become popular because they are popular
And so we have digg, memorandum etc. to give mob logic a chance to compete.
But will the mob compete? Is our new memeocracy any more meaninfully meritocratic? Will the mob tell us as much want we *need* to hear any more than what we just *want* to hear? Or will it too slip down the slope to superficial info-tainment well slid by mainstream media these many years?
Are we better off with the internets and with internets 2.0? I’d say so
BUT - until we can all upgrade to owning multiple brains were forever at the mercy of the limited capacity of human attention and –therefore- those who filter our top 40
The short tail is dead, long live the short tail.
It’s new name is the memeocracy
dahowlett
· 3 years ago
I'm not a fan of Techmemeorandum because it is inherently biased and the me-me kinda says it all. Bottom line - doesn't tell me what I'm interested in knowing about.
David Gibbons
· 3 years ago
Results 1 - 10 of about 1,650,000 for "blog aggregator"
potato - pot-aato - this is a semmantic issue Robert
CetaMac
· 3 years ago
Is there any difference to blogroll?
Buguldey
· 3 years ago
Unfortunately, the above comments are irrelevant and misleading.
Bottomline:
Guys subscribe to "popular" stuff ("popular" means silly, since 95-99% of the Earth's population *is* silly) and complain that they receive irrelevant content.
Subscribe to your personal keywords and tags, you'll get a fantastic growth of personal performance and satisfaction. You'll just get it, just think a bit. It's always good to think some more.
Delicious/rss/popular/sometag and Delicious/rss/tag/sometag is one of such sources I'd recommend. +feedster the same, +technorati watchlists the same. I am also seeking for better ways, there must be some. Web 2.0 researchers and academia don't sleep too, just watch/subscribe to their ideas, and you'll learn how to benefit. There are keywords/tags for such subscriptions.
Good luck.
Buguldey
· 3 years ago
However, "popular" in the scope of certain tags (i.e. within a tag/keyword used by smart/intelligent/wise people) means "fantastic, relevant, productive, excellent". Please proceed. Anyone silly would mention Meyrink? Anyone silly would mention Arvo Part? Anyone silly would mention Dostoevsky, Tarkovsky, Ontology learning and automatic knowledge acquisition, just to name a few? Choose *your* tags.
All Comments
Because I don't have the *time*?
For a blogger the only use would be to decide what subjects NOT to write about - they've already been done to death....... unless you're a traffic whore of course.
Michael: interesting about the "time." I like Memeorandum because it saves me time finding the latest news.
Brian: for me it's about being informed. I want to know what's going on in the world. It's sorta like "why read a newspaper?" Or, "why read Google news?"
Same thing. I wanna know what people think is important.
Sheesh, guys.
re: digg - its fun for wasting time, but I don't go there for any sort serious discussion. Slashdot at +4 is much better for quality comments.
By the time something's made enough links to get to the top of the page, and if I give a toss about it, I saw it yesterday already.
b) Because I'm interested in sites which tell me what's happening. I don't care what 25 random schmoes have to say about it after. Those few of the 25 I might want to see are in the trackbacks of the original, and there they have the advantage (missing from your sites) of containing an excerpt.
Otherwise what happens? See a sublink. Click. Oh, it's just a link to the other one with no comment at all. There's five seconds of my life I'm never going to get back.
So here's why I don't use them: I think they suck.
Incidentally, I also don't see what the big feckin deal is with endlessly cloning Blogdex/Daypop and calling it a business. [Yeah, I thought Blogdex/Daypop sucked too.]
"WEBTOOOO!" Yawn.
I'm interested in the disparity in search results for "memetracker" between Google and MSN. How do you account for this?
I don't see how tech.Memeorandum helps you there.
Except for lately (tech.Memeorandum seems to have changed in the last little while or I haven't been paying attention and it happened earlier), I found most of the information there was bloggers blogging about blogging and bloggers blogging about bloggers and blogging about ... well you get the picture. An echo chamber for bloggers.
As if blogging and talking about blogging was all there was to the tech world.
I have noticed though in the last few days that blogging related memes there seem to be a very low percentage (don't know if this is an anomoly or a trend). A trend I hope.
However, I can't use a memetracker to follow everything I want because none exists for the momblog space. I think it's a real lack. I've even considered developing one myself but I like writing about software better than building it. I'd love a mom.memeorandum.com that listed hot conversations about motherhood, like when an article appeared in American Prospect essentially saying that stay-at-home moms were failing the feminist movement. It'd have to use something like Stowe Boyd's conversational index to make sense of that domain, though, because linking across blogs is much more rare compared to tech.
I still don't use it though, mostly due to reasons others have cited. I get the 'latest and greatest' via other feeds.
Example: I'm subscribed to the del.icio.us/popular feed. For a long time I was also subscribed to the main Digg feed. A few days ago, I unsubscribed from Digg. It was mostly just the del.icio.us/popular stuff in Digg format. Now, whether Digg stole from del.icio.us, del.icio.us stole from Digg, or if the stuff got to the top in both places by being genuinely interesting, I don't know (nor do I care).
The fact is, I was getting duplicate info, and it was a waste of time. I opted to stay with del.icio.us for one reason. In my feed reader, when I click on the item title for del.icio.us, I go STRAIGHT to the page that is being linked to. With Digg, I click on the link, end up at Digg's site, then I have to click the title THERE to get to the point of the link.
I get why it's like that (ad money, hello!), but fact is, it's one step I don't need to take with del.icio.us.
Group think machines.
Self amplifying feedback loops.
I think what turns me off from Memeorandum is that the sources are too official. Looking at the sources for the stories on there now, I see the New York Times, WSJ, ZDNet, et al. I prefer to get my news in a more distilled fashion by the bloggers that I subscribe to.
I absolutely hate visiting mainstream media sites because they're so full of crap that I don't really need. I have to put up with flash animations, banner ads, and registration pages to get to a perhaps half-way decent story that is split up into 6 pages for the sole purpose of increasing ad impressions.
Contrast this with the typical blog which may have an AdSense pane or two and perhaps even a couple of Amazon affiliate links and I can also get to full posts in at most one extra click. With blogs I subscribe to, the content-to-cruft ratio shoots even higher.
I'm seeing 101 results on MSN (http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=memetrackers) and 892 results on Google (http://www.google.com/search?q=memetrackers).
Also, if "memetracker" is a piece of jargon that's been coined recently enough that there isn't even a Wikipedia article for it yet (as of 4:14 PM EST) it shouldn't be surprsing that people don't know what you're talking about.
Also nice: while Google claims (at the moment, on the datacenter I'm hitting) to know of 710 results, it will only show you 62 of them unless you insist on seeing duplicates, at which point the 710 turns into "about 694."
Google is screwing us again :mad:
No definitions were found for memetracker.
Like others here I've tried memeorandum and every time I read the feed it is all stuff I knew about yesterday or even longer ago, it is about on par or even behind Slashdot when it comes to breaking news.
The trouble is you are posing a question not to people who use other memetrackers, but to those who use none. The reason people don't use an entire type of technology is almost always exactly the same: "I have yet to see a compelling reason to use it."
So, the problem isn't that memetrackers need to have more results, prettier colors, different stories. If memetrackers want to catch on, they need to convince people that they are needed. There's no cut and dry answer for how to do that, particularly if the truth of the matter is that people really don't need memetrackers.
"Prediction- Google-powered Star Office suite for Dell"
Man am I sick of this crap, its been going around slashdot etc for ages
"2 Web Sites Push Further Into Services Real Estate Agents Offer"
Hmmm might have some limited interest to me
"Google hires Amazon's search chief"
Some tech company hires some guy. Whoop de doo
"Motorola Unveils Latest RAZR Slim Phone Z"
Already read this a few days back on Engadget, Gizmodo etc
Etc etc etc the list goes on, I either don't care about it, or I've already read it somewhere else that had much better coverage of it. Sorry Scoble, you're wrong, its crapola. I'm more confused as to why you always bang on about it on this website...
Also, this misuse of the word meme really should stop. I don't hear bloggers calling themselves memeticians. All these sites do is track news, something which news.google.com does far better.
> If memetrackers want to catch on, they need to convince people that they are needed.
Richard - I convinced myself that I needed a memetracker so I wrote chuquet.com primarily for myself. I've never really promoted it but a lot of people now use it. I often wish I knew what attracts them to it. It's not the colours, that's for sure :)
(nb I never called chuquet a memetracker until Robert Scoble coined the term - but personally I like it)
I don't use bloggers for news sources, because, as you have illustrated on any number of occasions, bloggers are perfectly willing to not check facts, verify stories, etc, if it means being first. You, Robert Scoble, poster boy for blogging have said that given the choice between accurate and first, you'll be first and then apologize. You act very consistently with this.
As a result, I really don't take any "fact" or "news" you relay seriously at all. you're far too loose with the facts to be trusted even a little. About all your reporting is good for is a starting point. But you're entertaining.
The problem is, you're hardly unique, or even the worst of the bunch. so it really doesn't matter that some memetracker site has 3405143646 links to blogs on a story.
90% of them will all be circle - jerking like mad.
90% of the rest will get their facts wrong
so that's what, 1%, maybe that will have a story worth looking at? Who has time for that BS?
I have a list I have created over the years, based on quality of writing and accuracy and depth of content. There's little a memetracker can do to beat critical selection of sources.
As well, they're nothing more than popularity contests. They aren't ranked based on quality of content, but on how many people like them. I left High School years ago, don't need a virtual version.
So I don't use them because they don't provide a useful service, and their rankings are BS.
i've been giving memeorandum a few minutes of my day for the last few days and I'm more impressed than I thought I'd be. It would be good to see more diverse sources and more content, and a few hours spent on the interface design would be great... but I'll certainly be giving it a few more minutes of my day for a while yet I think.
Fundamentals first.
Another thing about Memeorandem - its very US centric from what I can see.
I'd like to know what the difference is between what memeorandem sets out to do and what news.google.com sets out to do.
The space is still breaking. It's like asking "do you use an RSS aggregator" back in 2003. People look at you and wonder if you're insane.
Ask the same question in Q2 and they'll all be saying "Yup... I use TailRank" :)
Kevin
The two worst aspects of RSS and the blogus-sphere are the echo chamber and the republished press release (dittos). The memetracker is the echo chamber amplified.
If Memeorandum could magically list all the news that I care about then it could replace my list of feeds but that is never going to happen as my likes & dislikes are too organic and change too often for a web service to be able to meet that need.
I care (due to what I work in) mostly about Biotech (i.e. not current news and not commputer/internet). For all areas not listed above, they are absolutly pathetic. They are worse than useless in that they essentially only pick up herbal supplement ads. I can look at my spam folder if I really want to read those. I don't have to blow more time to find that.
For info on those areas, I read the selected people (you being one) that I think may cover the topic in a coherent way (whether I agree with it or not).
Granted, I haven't looked at them in awhile, but they sucked so badly when I did that I have to be motivated to go back and check again. Somewhat akin to what joelonsoftware has to say about the internet calendars. He expresses my feelings in words better than I can....
And alicia disagrees, Scoble, along with many, many others. What's your point? Everyone else is wrong? Or that you are the only one not exposed to this "news" in other places? Or that other people are better informed than you? Or that no one can disagree with you? (Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary!)
Jesus, man, accept it. Going back and forth: it does, it doesn't, it does, it doesn't doesn't get anywhere.
40 posts agreeing with alicia primarily and you being the rare exception (primarily) does demonstrate something however.
1. They rank what stories are deemed important by bloggers.
2. They provide links to other bloggers perspectives on the same topic,
3. They include news stories from traditional sources not found in blogs.
4. It saves me time so I don't need to visit all these other sites.
Findory is the only one I have seen that personalizes the stories you see based on what you have read before, and what others like you have read. In the long run I think this will prove to be very valuable in focusing on a subject, and finding new related content that you might not have found otherwise.
I interviewed Gabe Rivera of Memeorandum http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/...
and Greg Linden of Findory http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/...
I plan to ask Kevin Burton at TailRank for an interview next. I learned a lot about how these meme trackers work and why they are important by doing these interviews.
We are very early in the game, and we are the early adopters. This will be important in the future.
Don Dodge
But hey, I'm sure in a year or so I'll be talking about how I always saw great promise in "memetrackers" or "cross advertising between news and blogs" or whatever we call it then :)
The interesting things about memes and blogs, according to some, is that memetic evolution is screwing up natural selection something fierce, at least in humans. The meme, then, is threatening to replace the gene.
This doesn't just mean that more bloggers and nerds are getting laid these days, but that could be a nice added benefit.
As a PR guy, I'm interested in the influence that phrases and words and ideas have. Thus I'm fascinated by how quickly and widely a single blog post, for instance, gets linked to and referred to by other blogs.
Other than some of the specialization going on (e.g., Memeorandum in the political arena), I don't see what any of the sites listed above get me that del.icio.us/ popular or any other ranked blog search engine. There's a good list here: http://www.andreaswacker.com/memetrackers.html
(i.e., I want to find who the most influential blogs are that write about a topic, not just the most recent or the most "relevant"--whatever the hell *that* means ... what *does* relevance mean anyway in search enging results, never took the time to understand that?--findings).
1. I read 150 RSS feeds and every time I look at Memeorandum, it's full of things I saw two days ago.
2. I'm not at all interested in news as a popularity contest. If that "4 things" meme had a centralized place to link to, it would have been at the top of Memeorandum - and it's not news, it's fluff.
3. They lack focus. Digg will promote anything about celebrities or Flash, and I'm not interested in 90% of what gets promoted. Tech.memeorandum claims to be focused, but let's face it: "tech" isn't a focus. Just about anything posted on a weblog can be "tech". And if I chose my own focus, "tech" wouldn't be it.
4. On top of everything else: I'm not in the habit of looking for new things to read. I've got work to do, and I'm already reading 150 news sources.
To me, sites like this are (a) a way to quickly "get up to speed" for those who aren't already plugged in and reading lots of weblogs, and (b) a way for RSS-crazed infomaniacs like me to find new things to read. The trouble is, I already have a great way to find new things (personal recommendations from those 150 people) that works far, far better.
Part of your problem is probably the terminology - "memetracker" means nothing to me. I'll bet there are more people on earth right now who have heard of Digg.com than know what the word "meme" means.
1. Narrow focus
2. Much of it is old news
3. Circle, circles, circled linked
4. Not very useful
5. One, 'chuquet.com', gives me a headache just looking at it. The page is so busy :)
http://www.stephenduncanjr.com/2006/02/memetrac...
Reddit - http://www.reddit.com
Robert, didn't you just point out you were not #1 on the Wordpress list because some nobody got himself on the digg site..twice. They just seem like a huge waste of time.
Please post why we should be using a memtracker?
Just my 2 cents. Hey, it's early here I am just having my first cup of coffee.
See doc searls again today http://doc.weblogs.com/2006/02/10#theSourceocracy and his long post on the tyranny of the Alist gatekeepers of the blogosphere. And memes become popular because they make the Alist, the become popular because they are popular
And so we have digg, memorandum etc. to give mob logic a chance to compete.
But will the mob compete? Is our new memeocracy any more meaninfully meritocratic? Will the mob tell us as much want we *need* to hear any more than what we just *want* to hear? Or will it too slip down the slope to superficial info-tainment well slid by mainstream media these many years?
Are we better off with the internets and with internets 2.0? I’d say so
BUT - until we can all upgrade to owning multiple brains were forever at the mercy of the limited capacity of human attention and –therefore- those who filter our top 40
The short tail is dead, long live the short tail.
It’s new name is the memeocracy
potato - pot-aato - this is a semmantic issue Robert
Bottomline:
Guys subscribe to "popular" stuff ("popular" means silly, since 95-99% of the Earth's population *is* silly) and complain that they receive irrelevant content.
Subscribe to your personal keywords and tags, you'll get a fantastic growth of personal performance and satisfaction. You'll just get it, just think a bit. It's always good to think some more.
Delicious/rss/popular/sometag and Delicious/rss/tag/sometag is one of such sources I'd recommend. +feedster the same, +technorati watchlists the same. I am also seeking for better ways, there must be some. Web 2.0 researchers and academia don't sleep too, just watch/subscribe to their ideas, and you'll learn how to benefit. There are keywords/tags for such subscriptions.
Good luck.