The Google News of the blog world
Wired magazine has a good story
(Cliff Notes From the Blog World, By Ryan Singel,
Wired, October 21, 2005)
on a useful new service that tracks
blogs and what’s being discussed.
- Memeorandum “Political Web,
page A1″ - tech.memorandum “Tech Web,
page A1″
The service “aims to be the automated newspaper of the online world”
and provides two distinct and separate views, one for politics and one for
technology. Each is updated every 5 minutes with the most relevant items
from thousands of news sites and weblogs. As the Wired story notes,
“in addition to automatically tracking the top stories of the day, it also
highlights the conversations between bloggers and mainstream media about
each topic.”
“If you read blogs, you know that there is this
conversation and that some articles are the talk of the day, and other
posts have important things to say about those,” Rivera said. “If you built
graphs in your mind of what the talk looks like, I think it looks like what
I’ve done. I get the sense (Memeorandum) is just a natural representation
of what is already going on.”Rivera hopes the site will appeal to more than just the Ÿberconnected,
and could be useful as an entry point for those unfamiliar with blogs. To
that end, the site’s design, which features large headlines and stories in
declining order of importance, mimics that of an online newspaper.