Take A Peek at memeorandum — if you haven’t already.
When memeorandum first started TMV did a Take A Peek on it, and in reality it doesn’t need one from TMV anymore. But we did get some new readers this year. So in case you don’t know about it….you need to. Not only have thousands of bloggers, non-bloggers and news media types made it a part of their daily (or hourly) web surfing, but it is finally getting the mainstream news media notice it deserves.
The Guardian has this must read piece:
If you want to know what’s happening in the world, then Memorandum will tell you – at least in a couple of areas. It’s an automated news clipping service, known in the trade as a “news aggregator”. It provides headlines and short texts updated every few minutes, with links to the original sites, much like Google News.
Memeorandum is based on the idea of “memes” or ideas that spread across the web (along with a pun on memorandum). Someone publishes an interesting story, other people find it, discuss it, and link to it. That’s how the web works. Small stories come and go quickly, while big ones generate lots of comment and dominate the page for hours.
The developer, Gabe Rivera, says it’s all done in software. He provides a list of publications as “seeds,” but the software still finds stories on sites he’s never heard of. It’s just a question of following links, and then trying to assess the contents. The algorithms are, obviously, secret.
The Guardian contrasts memeorandum’s speed with Google News (faster) and then discusses some of its drawbacks (on balance they prove not to be real drawbacks and factors that can adjust themselves). And then it offers this quote from Rivera:
Tech.memeorandum was launched in September 2005, so the biggest mystery of all is why a rich global corporation has not made Gabe an offer he can’t refuse and globalised his system. He’s had offers, but he values his freedom and says: “I don’t want to be accountable to organisations that appear clueless about the future of news.”
Read the piece in its entirety.
We’ve been in touch with Rivera by email over the years, and that quote confirms our impression of him as a free and visionary thinker who has revolutionized the news menu on the Internet and worked to fine tune his sites menu and delivery system. And he also now offers several other similar sites mimi memeorandum for mobiles, techme (for technology), wesmirch (for celebrity news), and ballbug (for baseball fans).
Take A Peek at memeorandum and all of Rivera’s other aggregaters and we’re SURE you’ll take a daily hourly peek….at them all. P.S.: The Guardian recognition shows that good things do happen to creative, innovative people, who can have a big impact…as memeorandum most assuredly has. And will.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.