New Memeorandum Great Blend Of Top Blog & News Material

New site Memeorandum provides a Google
News-like clustering of news stories and blog commentary on various topics. So
far, it looks pretty clean and nice to me, well worth anyone checking out.

Interested in politics? Then see the site’s
home page, as that’s where political
news and commentary is assembled. After tech news? See the
tech section. Additional sections are
promised
to come.

Where’s the content coming from? Creator Gabe Rivera explains more about the
service
here on the site’s blog and how it’s designed to tap into authoritative
commentators and stories in various areas. However, that post and the site
itself is sparse on details of the mechanics.

Fortunately, Robert Scoble has more info in his review
here,
having viewed the site in testing apparently for several months. The service
uses a white list of tech and political blogs and then builds out inclusion of
other sources based on what they link to. That can include other blogs or more
traditional news sources.

Spotted via
Dave Winer, Richard MacManus has another review
here, highlighting
more of how things work. In short, the more links to a post, the bigger the post
headline will be.

Huh? To understand more, here’s a look at what’s on the tech home page right
now. It’s topped by a story from BusinessWeek on "Why eBay Is Buying Skype."
That’s the biggest link, and then there are "Related Items" below it, other
stories from blogs or traditional news sources. Each story also has a
"Discussion" line, which links to blog that may be commenting on the item.

Below the eBay item are other items, such as the launch of Memeorandum itself, a
the trademark dispute over Gmail, the Game Boy Micro and so on. Each item may
have further related items and discussion.

It’s a compelling blend. For me, "blog" search has really meant largely
commentary search. Many blogs comment on news, and many have been frustrated by
existing tools making it hard to get the good commentary when you want it. But
some blogs also report news, so excluding them from a "news search" has meant
that you might miss news until it hits more mainstream sources. Memeorandum ties
the two together nicely, especially managing that tricky switch of knowing when
a blog is reporting "news" rather than commenting.

Look in the right-hand column, and you can see that you can subscribe to an RSS
feed and get updated with new material, which apparently flows in every five
minutes. The feed isn’t as nice as the home page, in that the clustering doesn’t
happen, nor do you appear to get related discussion links for an item. But if
you want to get a regular dose of most-linked-to stories, it’s a nice solution.

Robert wrote that the service has done a great job eliminating noise and spam in
the months he’s used it. I’ve also found those to be a plague when I’ve tried
blog search as places like Technorati or PubSub. My limited look so far gives a
thumbs up on these fronts to Memeorandum.

On the downside, there’s no keyword search facility that I can see. I want that,
and soon! And be careful of the name. It’s a play on meme + memorandium and
probably a bad choice in that many will likely misspell. Heck, Robert did in the
title of his post about the service. Use an E, not an O.

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Postscript: See More On Memeorandum with comments from creator Gabe Rivera on whether keyword search would be coming, more about how sources are added and dropped and what other vertical topics may be coming.