Library clips

Memeorandum is a new service that displays newsmastering at its best, actually I don’t know how the content is derived, but I think it’s more complicated than making RSS radars…and presenting them in an automated Public RSS Aggregator (so it is way beyond DIY Newsmastering).

So far there are 2 versions:
Tech
Politics (default home page)

del.icio.us popular is great for breaking stuff, but it only includes news that is bookmarked.

CommonTimes is a news folksonomy, but again it is reliant on human indexing

Technorati popular is also great for breaking news in the news or blogosphere…but the presentation just doesn’t cut it, it just looks like basic search engine results.

This is where Memeorandum makes a difference as the presentation looks like an interesting news portal

Top items are in the body of the page

- Title, description, and source for each item, with referenced links called “Discussion”…each reference (discussion link) has a direct link, whereas in Technorati you have to go to another page first

- it also indents related items underneath the news item, with their own discussion links as well, so it kind of tries to collapse similar news items like Google News (this is a great feature)

- The end of the page has “more items” and “earlier picks”.

New items are on the sidebar

- when you click on one, it will go to where it lives in the body of the page

The preferences link reveals even more greatness:

Show Discussion Excerpts

- clicking on this will expand to a one line description of each discussion which live under each item (so now you can toggle for more information without leaving the page)

Show Link Search

- if the discussion links aren’t enough you can click on this which lists a variety of RSS engines URL links for that item

The premise is similar to Technorati as the ranking is based on incoming links, the most linked to sites are at the top of the page and weighted in larger font, and so on…

The added extra is the one liner posts are ignored, this makes way for longer posts which have hopefully more substance.

I don’t know what selection of the blogosphere is being tracked (the key is to cover as much as you can but still have quality - reduce the noise…spam…non-worthy blogs)

A consise explanation from Read/Write Web:

“How it works: the more people that link to a blog post, the bigger the headline. The biggest and most recent headlines are at the top of the page, but move down as newer popular stories emerge to take their place. Below the original source of each story are links to other bloggers who have linked to it. But the beauty of it is, only posts with a decent amount of writing in them make the memeorandum page. A simple link and a sentence won’t do.”

Scobleizer has more about how it relieves RSS overload:

“Well, remember that I read 1,389 RSS feeds? Well, it takes a weirdo like me hours to go through all of those and finding trends in that is pretty difficult.
What is important to the bloggers? You won’t know unless you read all those blogs and keep track mentally of when various bloggers link to something or talk about it.
Memeorandum chews through thousands of blogs in minutes and tells you what’s important. It does this every few minutes. It is dramatically faster than I could ever be. It’s all machine based. No humans involved.
…there’s some limitations. First, his system today does only follows two communities: tech bloggers and political bloggers.
Second of all, he doesn’t look at all of the blogs in the world (unless you hit preferences and start using the blog search services he’s linked in)
…It’s very cool, because it has very low noise. In fact, I’ve been visiting this 10 to 50 times a day for the last few months and I’ve never seen something that I would call noise or spam.”

Suggestion

What if you are not interested in all the news:

- RSS Search like Google News would be great

- Adding a tag cloud so the user could click on hot keyword topics…with an RSS for each tag

Grab the RSS feed for tech.memeorandum or go to the site to choose your RSS Reader from a nifty drop-down menu.
(The RSS version doesn’t include an excerpt or the related items or the discussion links).

A small selection of some other services that break news:

Manual

Bookmarks

populicio.us (add on for del.icio.us…also see trendalicious!…and a host of other visual versions…plus livemarks.)
CommonTimes
digg (ranked by ratings)
and many more…

Group blog/forum

World Changing
Boing Boing (also suggest a site)
Slashdot (also suggest a site)
Crooked Timber
Many2Many
and many more…

Communal/forum

Threadwatch
Smart Mobs
Boxes & Arrows
tagsurf

Blog Collectives

Weblogs Inc
9rules
MSN Filter
Yahoo! Health Blogs
Corante
ZDNet
InfoWorld
Lockergnome
Communication Agents
and many more…

Public RSS Aggregators

see here…more

Automated

RSS engines

Technorati Popular
(Thought I’d include these…and Technorati Tags…and Technorati Blog Finder)
Blogpulse Trend
PubSub
Feedster Top 500
IceRocket Blog Trend…and IceRocket Blog Topics
and many more…

RSS Readers

Bloglines Most Popular Links
Rojo Today
…and many more (maybe!)

News Wires

PrimeZone
Market Wire
Business Wire
PR Web
PR Newswire
and many more…

Traditional News Engines

News Now
Topix
Yahoo! News
Google News
MSN News Bot
All Headlines News
Findory (personalised)
News Is Free
Inform
and many more…

[ADDED 31/10/05: Check out Blogniscient]
[ADDED 2/11/05: Check out Custom Scoop]
[ADDED 2/11/05: Check out NewsTrove]
[ADDED 21/11/05: Check out Newsvine]
[ADDED 22/12/05: Technorati Explore]
[ADDED 22/12/05: Corante Hubs]
[ADDED 22/12/05: Topix - blogosphere]