Ted Leung on the air: Open Source, Java, Python, and ...
I wish I was as excited about the new Memeorandum as everyone else seems to be. I used the original Memeorandum, and it did a good job of finding the major political stories, and I mean it when I say stories, because most of the primary sources that came up were newspaper articles. The new Memeorandum is doing a little better, because I occasionally see actual blog posts as primary articles. The Technology version is doing a little better at finding blog posts, or perhaps it's just that too many of the bloggers that Memeorandum searches spend their time writing about MSM articles.
If you are interested in what everybody is talking about, then I suppose that Memeorandum is really useful. The thing is, I care much more about the long tail bloggers that Memeorandum isn't picking up. What I'd really like is a version of Memeorandum that lets me specify the starting set of bloggers, so that I could have my own customized, potentially long-tail (depending on who I put in the starting set) Memeorandum. Now that I could get excited about.
A personalized page would clearly be excellent. I'm nowhere close to enabling such a thing. That would require a bigger operation, and I'm not sure such a company makes sense now, given the "competition" plus the opportunity costs of not focusing on some other good things I want to do.
Two random points:
- Many readers deep into their own Tech long-tail still find the current Tech site useful. Because it surfaces interesting things they miss from their normal reads. Not everyone, probably not you, but alot of people.
- Memeorandum doesn't highlight anything close to what "everybody is talking about". Most of the page contains items that less than 1% of the bloggers sampled are talking about. Yeah, I know what you mean, and it even sounds right on the surface, but it doesn't accurately characterize what's featured on the site.
Anyway, thanks for your input. If I keep hearing about my.memeorandum.com, maybe it really will need to happen!
Posted by Gabe at Fri Sep 23 03:07:07 2005
I quite like it. It doesn't have the depth required to do the "long tail" thing perfectly, but the personalization works really well and I know it has shown me things I would have missed previously.
Posted by Nick Lothian at Sun Sep 25 18:45:22 2005
Posted by Trackback from rc3.org at Mon Sep 26 12:32:31 2005
Posted by Trackback from rc3.org at Mon Sep 26 12:34:53 2005
My apologies -- it was an accident. I'm getting innundated with comment spam, and I must have selected your comment by accident. Go ahead and leave it again.
Ted
Posted by Ted Leung at Tue Sep 27 10:18:33 2005
I just wanted to add that I think your idea for improving Memeorandum is spot on. In addition, I'd love to make such a personal page public - so that it can be of use to others.
Posted by Karl at Tue Sep 27 16:53:38 2005
To insert a URI, just type it -- no need to write an anchor tag.
Allowable html tags are:
<a href>
, <em>
, <i>
, <b>
, <blockquote>
, <br/>
, <p>
, <code>
, <pre>
, <cite>
, <sub>
and <sup>
.You can also use some Wiki style:
URI => [uri title]
<em> => _emphasized text_
<b> => *bold text*
Ordered list => consecutive lines starting spaces and an asterisk