Don Dodge

Memeorandum is a new blog "news clipper service". It constantly monitors new blog posts and publishes the title and first 50 words or so to the dynamic news page. The page updates every few minutes with new high quality material. There are currently two news pages. One for technology and another for politics.

They appear to have an algorithm similar to Google that ranks posts based on the number of links to it from other blogs. I believe it works by feeding the spider a list of known active blog sites, indexing those posts, and following links by that author to other posts. It probably does this for many iterations until it finds everything new in a particular topic domain. The 80/20 rule applies to blogs too. If you start with a list of 100 or so popular blogs on any given topic by "spidering" all the posts and links you can find most of the remaining high quality content.

Once it has collected all the posts it ranks all them based on the number of links to them. The trick is that it does this in near real time. That takes a lot of compute cycles. It will be interesting to see how they scale up to manage the growth.

The other trick is finding new authors who may not yet have many links. It is possible to miss some very high value content by relying on the self perpetuating link algorithm. Google has the same problem.

Today Meme-orandum covers two very specific topic areas; technology and politics. They attempt to monitor updates to all blogs in these two topic areas rather than the entire blogosphere. So it works more like a news page than a search engine.  They do have a search box on the site but it redirects to Google.

If you want to see a snapshot of what is new and highly ranked in the blog world take a look at the Tech Memeorandum. There is a separate memeorandum for politics if that is your area of interest.