You must have heard a number of times about Memeorandum given that the biggest fan and user of the application is Robert Scoble. He introduced me to the initial implementation around BloggerCon III, and this is also when I met Gabe Rivera, the innovator behind Memeorandum.
What is the main concept ? The program is going to monitor a set of news sources, track the links pointing to news items, and elevate the posts that get most linked. You can also see short snippets of these “linking” posts.
What is it used for ? To show what are the most important conversations going on (based on the number of links, etc.). Today’s tech meme is the acquisition of Skype by eBay, which leads the home page to be almost only focused on that topic.
Gabe just released the second version of this application, that now covers News/Politics and Technology. Scoble has a long post explaining the new functionality in detail, and the new Memeorandum blog is providing a lot of useful background.
Try it, play with it, but be mindful of the fact that Gabe is running this out of a limited infrastructure Gabe now has setup a "real" back-end infrastructure, co-located, etc. I personally like the concept, and am looking forward to having the ability to restrict topics/blogs/tags in order to focus on the topics I am interested in. Linking this to attention data be very natural, once they have been collected in a usable form.
Hi Jeff,
About infrastructure: actually, unless it's mentioned on Desperate Housewives, I think it should handle whatever traffic arises. Everything lives on dedicated servers now. Dedicated servers aren't terribly cheap, but they're not too expensive either.
About restricting things: personalization could be good. Not sure it's the best next step for me though... Maybe I'll talk about this the next time I bump into you!
Posted by: Gabe | September 13, 2005 at 12:53 AM