I’ve previously profiled Memeorandum, and there are no major announcements or feature releases to spur this new post.
However, something much more significant is happening because of Memeorandum, and I am not the only person to notice it.
Robert Scoble, who writes about it often, says “Anyway, sorry that I am fawning over it so much. It’s just changed my life, that’s all.”
Dave Winer writes “I find it’s changed the way I think about blogging. Not many of these tech gadgets do that.”
If you don’t know about Memeorandum yet, check out the site and read my profile. Memeorandum is the “newspaper” for anyone interested in what’s happening right now in politics or technology.
Regarding my statement in the title of this post, I really do believe that Memeorandum is forcing a subtle but important shift in the way many of us use the web.
Memeorandum finds blog posts, newspaper articles and press releases that are being heavily linked to in near real time and puts them up on the site. The position and size of the headline is indicative of its importance (determined by number of links and other factors, such as how much people are writing about the linked content). The higher up and bigger the headline, the more important it is. And linking sites, the conversation, are clustered underneath the headline.
This means you can find out in near real time what is important in technology (or politics), how important it is, and who’s talking about it. If you then post on the subject, you will be linked into the discussion as well.
If I have limited time and I need to find out what’s going on, I turn to Memeorandum. I am on this site at least 15 times a day. I am finding that reading feeds in my reader (the old way I used to find out what was hot) takes much longer, has a much longer lag time, and significantly more noise (Memeorandum has virtually no noise – everything is relevant).
So Memeorandum is changing my reading behavior, but it is also changing my writing behavior. It is much easier for me to find and read everything that is being written about a topic (Memeorandum also includes links to the real time search engines for additional material). I find that I am more educated on the topics I write about, and am writing more often about things the web feels are important at the time.
It’s a damn ugly site, but it is the most useful tool I have to discover real time content on the web.