The John Dvorakification of the blogosphere (I’m signing off of Memeorandum)

Hi Robert

You’re on the money that usefulness is missing in the whole meme “sphere”. The idea of a meme is good. The idea of finding a meme of interest to you today (relevance) is hard. The majority of meme sites are just coughing up the newest news. And quite often the very best posts on a subject (a meme) are not the newest ones. So IMO new /= relevant. Launrence Timms (Chuquet) and I (reBlogger) are initiating a conversation along those lines here:
http://reblogger.wordpress.com/2006/03/03/memes-or-just-news/

Opinions and thoughts are welcome.

Thanks,
Mark.

I have to agree with you Robert, that whole purpose of blogging gets lost in the efforts of everyody to be seen/heard. One of the things that people tend to do is attempt to make money from whatever they can, this leads to advertising (seems that this system is ingrained into our DNA), which leads (hopefully) to profits. (there is a reason that Google is a force). A majority of bloggers could not care less about traffic or any of the related crap that is associated with it, all they want to do is talk about what intrests them (Passion) and see where it takes them.
Welcome back to being who you are

I have to agree with you Robert, that whole purpose of blogging gets lost in the efforts of everyody to be seen/heard. One of the things that people tend to do is attempt to make money from whatever they can, this leads to advertising (seems that this system is ingrained into our DNA), which leads (hopefully) to profits. (there is a reason that Google is a force). A majority of bloggers could not care less about traffic or any of the related crap that is associated with it, all they want to do is talk about what intrests them (Passion) and see where it takes them.
Welcome back to being who you are

This is very interesting. I agree with Gabe, it is not conflict that use both meme and rss reader.

Hehe… I like the Dvorak reference…

Seriously Robert – you do make a good point on this. For me its tedious to dredge through Memeorandum to find interesting articles. Gabe may also be correct about the site on weekends. I’ve found good days and bad days for reading t.m., but mostly its frustrating to find anything relevent or intellegent to read.

The best new blogs I’ve found have been linked off of blogs that I read regularly – I’ve yet to find a new blog off t.m. that I return to.

-Rick

I am impressed. I have noticed lately the Scobleizer focus has been on the people in the blogs, and had lost the focus on the new/ cool interesting things going on, that suggest IMHO we are on the verge of a “tipping point” as Web 2.0 ( I hate that espression) takes hold.
Welcome back!!

Rick and others, why have I changed on Memeorandum lately? Cause more and more blogs got ADDED and I couldn’t delete the ones who weren’t adding value to me. But, giving me a customized version of Memeorandum will take more machines. Gabe, when you gonna get funded and start making this a personizable service?

Kevin: I’m getting more and more impressed by TailRank. It still brings me too much stuff too, but one of you will hit on the magic combination. I can’t wait.

I have posted my comments about this here: http://www.vasanth.in/2006/03/06/ReadingStylesFeedAggregatorVsMemetracker.aspx.

Some how trackback does not work.

I’m not sure why they chose to print such unkindly words. I haven’t heard hyperbole like that since… the old Bill Gates! Just kidding.

why write s**t when we all know you mean shit. The same with f**k, we know you mean fuck. Why bother blanking out bits? We can all cope with swearing.

If s**t == shit, the surely s**t is just as rude?

monk.e.boy

Man…who decides what is news and what isn’t? Brrreeee…whatever that was news for, like, how long? And a totally valid, yet a little too vicious for it’s own good, conversation about grassroots technology gatherings and the fear of the co-optation of them isn’t news?

Hmmmm…

oh…and…for the record…I don’t think any of us wanted to be such a news item on Memeorandum. The snark came from true places of passion and hurt.

…I didn’t even know it was there until I saw it appear in my bloglines…in your post and Richard’s.

I use tech.memeorandum, tailrank and slashdot (GLADLY) as safety nets. I focus on relatively obscure feeds in my aggregator. If I didn’t have those services around to make sure I don’t miss the popular, general interest stuff, I’d have to subscribe to a lot more feeds.

Well if you had been paying more attention to newer RSS feeds and your constant new discoveries you might have seen this folknology post : http://www.folknology.com/blog/1/1/2006/2/18/39 and de-focussed from the meme earlier.

Although keeping the meme as an RSS feed can still make sense.

Enjoy the return of sernedipity
regards Al

My individual RSS reading has been off a bit as well, but you may be throwing the baby out with the bath water here. Memeorandum is an excellent place to get a quick snapshot, say first thing in the morning, to see what is going on. Most of the time I see it and don’t blog from what I find there. Sometimes I do.

But what’s been zapping my time more than anything these days are my Digg feeds. With Digg feeds I can customize by subject, person, etc. and get generally speaking interesting stories (most people try to submit stuff that will get dugg). Because it’s focused on feeds I’ve set up (search terms of interest) it’s focus is great. It’s much broader than the authorities who get on Memeorandum and helps me find interesting new bloggers and people all the time.

I think there is a place for all three though, my Memeorandum reading, RSS and Digg searches. But in the end we all only have so much time and it’s a zero sum game to some degree.

My problem with all of my blogs that I track is that so often they post articles I’m not interested in. I still think someone needs to come up with RSS feeds for search terms in predefined authority filters.

Robert,

Memeorandum suffers from the same affliction that all peer ranking sites do. It is the very samething that makes them popular. Its the people who read them. Its not that they are bad, but its always the same people and as someone pointed out above, popular does not mean interesting or noteworthy. By using sites like Memeorandum, Digg, and the like; we’ve given up a fair amount of control for the convenience and automatic filtering of what we see.

As far as the snarking goes, people will be people. No matter what the medium is, if it is open to the public to participate it will happen, especially with the anonymity of the net. Just look at the history: BBS’s, Usenet, then websites and forums, now blogs. They all suffered from snarking. Why should a peer aggregator/ranking site that culls from these sources be any different? A desktop or web personal aggregator isn’t going to be much different as the sources are the same. The only difference is that you can remove a feed from your radar if it gets too noisy for you.

So my question to you Robert isn’t should you sign off or use a personal aggregator, but wouldn’t something like Feed Demon’s watches be more suitable?

Communities rise and fall, like civilizations; the tide rolls in and rolls out; music scenes bloom and wither. Do what builds you up.

I can’t resist. All this talk about snark made me think of Lewis Carroll. I really like his description of a Snark in the second fit (See http://www.literature.org/authors/carroll-lewis/the-hunting-of-the-snark/chapter-02.html), the fifth mark of a Snark is ambition, which seems entirely appropriate.

And if you read Fit the First, then the first two verses might aptly describe Memeorandum!

I personnally do not use memeorandum.

Maybe because I am not a Tech guy, I usually read varied blogs on a number of topics.

I find ideas and inspiration for my business in many places including the following: Coudal, Learned on Women, Is my blog Burning, Chocolate & Zucchini, Knowledge at Wharton to name a few.
I like the diversity.

While visiting the SEOS in New York last week, a number of companies in the Expo bored me by repeatedly bringing up Google rather than telling me how special they were.

Serge
http://www.njconcierges.com
Blog:
http://sergetheconcierge.typepad.com

I’ve recently cleaned up my bloglines subs for largely the same reason, and I have also noticed an unsettling trend for bloggers to go well beyond snark and cross into outright cruelty and insults in order to generate traffic to their blogs. It’s almost like the troll is no longer content to spew in comments, but has figured out that he can draw a small profit by pulling people into his own blog.

The posts you linked are all interesting; any chance you’d share your RSS subs (or part of them) with the unwashed masses who also like to feel smarter?

Wil: my RSS subs are shared on the right side of my blog. (Use the NewsGator one, it’s more up to date).