October 21, 2005 | A Newspaper for the Blog World

My RSS feed reader makes me tired.  Though it makes me smarter, it takes too much effort.

For months now, I've been looking for a better way to get a quick sense of what's going on on the web.

Looks like Gabe Rivera, an extraordinarily nice guy who talked to me at Bar Camp without even mentioning his site, has solved a big part of the problem.

Blog addicts overwhelmed by information may have found their savior.

Memeorandum, which started with a focus on political blogs in 2004 and launched a technology version just weeks ago, aims to be the automated newspaper of the online world.

It attempts to solve the problem of information overload with a few smart algorithms that constantly track the hot topics in tech and politics blogs.

However, it's not just the Google News of the blog world, since in addition to automatically tracking the top stories of the day, it also highlights the conversations between bloggers and mainstream media about each topic.

Gabe Rivera, the 32-year-old programmer who quit his job at Intel to found the site, says he built Memeorandum thinking of the "live web as an editor."

"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."

Full Wired News take on Memeorandum.

Nathan Torkington and Rael Dornfest, two of the drivers of the O'Reilly media and conference machine, chirped in from Amsterdam.

From Nathan:

"At last, an aggregator that attenuates using the wisdom of crowds. Findory attempted to filter based on what you'd looked at, but Memeorandum filters based on what others are talking about. Memeorandum is as much about aggregating reader intelligence as it is about aggregating articles. It's a great step toward a tool that can turn a flood of grapes into a trickle of fine wine. Google News aggregates the editorial judgement from newspapers, but Memeorandum treats blogs and newspapers equally which means it's tapped into the collective zeitgeist of the net."

Rael sees somes lessons in Memeorandum for folks in old media:

"The role and sustainability of "old media" (let's call it "read-only media") is oft questioned in the context of "new media" (or "read/write media"). What will the New York Times do when user-written news outstrips traditional news--at least in quantity and timeliness? How will Business 2.0 keep up with the appetites of RSS-addicted business persons? Why, the same way they've always done: editorial. Just as nobody in their right mind pages through AP and Reuters feeds, the current trend of clicking reload on one's RSS reader simply can't be sustained.

Just as readers turn to the NYT or Business 2.0 as a lense through which to see the world, these purveyors of editorial guidance will turn their attention to and attenuate the new blog-driven ticker feeds and provide the same service they always have. Memeorandom provides a nice glimpse of what the NYT newsreader might look like."

P.S. This was my first attempt to post (and then edit a post) using the new Flock browser and I'm pretty impressed.

Technorati Tags: memeorandum, web2.0, rss

Posted by Ryan Singel at October 21, 2005 04:11 PM