Company: I’ve been using Memeorandum for about a month (since Bar Camp in August). Gabe Rivera, the creator, gave me a private demo and set up a demo site for me (no longer active). Like Robert Scoble, I was hooked immediately.
This is a HUGE thing to me. If you are a busy executive and only have five minutes a day to see what the blogs are saying, this is THE PLACE to come to every day.
Memeorandum is the result of Gabe’s frustration with tracking blogger conversations about a given topic. Search engine weren’t producing intelligent results, and links from blogs didn’t tell the full story. So like any good entrepreneur, he set out to tackle the problem. And boy did he come up with a compelling solution. It’s one of those sites you just keep coming back to, every day.
The Service
Memeorandum is a way to track blog conversations relating to political or tech issues (Gabe can and probably will add additional verticals in the future) in a highly effective manner. When you go to the site you see what is being talked about the most in the blogsphere at that moment. The most highly linked articles appear at the top and in bigger font sizes. Less popular items are below. Super-popular items eventually are pushed down as newer popular stuff goes up.
Here’s how it works: A post is written. People start to link to it. If enough people link and it becomes very popular, it goes up in the “New Item Finder” area in the top right. If more people link, it will go up in the main area. If a link includes conversation and discourse (substantial text in addition to the link), the linking blog is noted underneath the popular post.
All of this is automated, which is the really beautiful part of the service.
Memeorandum is very low noise, too. It tracks about 2,000 blogs today – only content from those blogs comes up on the site. Yes, it’s a limitation, but it results in very relevant and high quality results. Gabe will add more quality blogs over time.
It sounds complicated, but it is a very useful way to monitor conversations about popular things going on in the blogosphere. Things went crazy last week, for instance, when Google launched its blog search engine. Memeorandum sorted it all out, in near real time (it updates every 5 minutes), and presented the information in a logical way.
Additional Reading
Memeorandum blog SEW blog, Dave Winer, Richard MacManus, Jeff Clavier, Barb Dybwad, Robin Good