Meme Tracking
Posted by Patrick on February 4th, 2006
Meme – (Source: Wikipedia) one can roughly define ‘meme’ as any piece of information transferable from one mind to another. Examples might include thoughts, ideas, theories, practices, habits, songs, dances and moods. Different definitions of meme generally agree, very roughly, that a meme consists of some sort of a self-propagating unit of cultural evolution having a resemblance to the gene (the unit of genetics).
With the near ubiquity of online communications (email, blogs, usenet, etc.) memes in the 21st century have been turbocharged, but with this ubiquity comes information overload. In order to manage this information, one must have a reliable system of filters in place. And if you want to keep your finger on the pulse of the colective online psyche, then you are going to need meme filters.
I?Äôve written about two new real-time news aggregators today, Megite and Newroo.
The space is clearly hot, with both funded and unfunded companies rushing to release products. The goal? Leverage all of the great edge blog content out there, figure out what?Äôs hot at any given time by analyzing who?Äôs linking to who (as well as other tools) and presenting that hot content to users.
It?Äôs not easy to define this space. In general, I think the services that are focusing mostly on blog links are turning up the best stuff. Many of the services that Paul Montgomery listed in a post earlier this week don?Äôt do this?Ķthey rely on user voting or other algorithms to determine relevance.
And Pete Cashmore?Äôs post from yesterday didn?Äôt capture all that I?Äôve found to date.
My list is below. These sites either use incoming links or story clusters (or both) to determine relevance, and show the linking/discussing blogs. I have written about many of these separately already. The others I will write about in the future if their features are or become interesting.
The List:
- Blogniscient
- Blogrunner
- Blogsnow
- Chuquet
- Megite
- Memeorandum
- Newroo (pre-launch)
- Tailrank
- Technorati Kitchen
- Tinfinger (pre-launch)
- Topix.net
- TruthLaidBear
The best? Still Memeorandum, but I love the experiments being tried by other services.
And something else: these services are going to start getting acquired by the big guys, if only for the brilliance of the engineering work behind the engines.
No related posts.