I Agree, Memorandum Sucks

Scoble: Nick says Memorandum sucks

Nick Davis says he’s done with Memeorandum and is going back to Newsmap. Says I like Memeorandum cause I appear on top of that page.

Well, yes, but that’s only cause the rest of you haven’t started participating in the conversation. Memeorandum is done automatically by analyzing linking and posting behavior. If you wanna be on top write a more interesting post. Hey, I bet this one has a chance of getting on Memeorandum.

I can’t see what the big deal about Memorandum is. I went through the process of moving to RSS so I didn’t have to check a web page multiple times every day to get information. I tweaked my RSS subscriptions so that they gave me just the content I wanted – my individualized little long tail. My choice of topics mixed in together.

Why would I want to switch back to the browser to use Memorandum and get someone else’s idea of what’s important, with a mishmash of topics that I may or may not be interested in, all based on what the majority of people are linking to. That’s not the long tail, that’s the ridiculously popular tail and the more popular blogs will float to the top more often because more people read them so more people link to them. Anything that works by watching what people link to is hugely affected by original popularity because otherwise people don’t hear about the article in the first place so they can’t link to it.

Now the obvious reply is that only a couple of people link at first and then it spreads because those people are read by a few more people and so on. The trouble is that it requires people to actually take action and get around to blogging it.  Most people don’t maintain link blogs like Scoble so unless they have something to add to the discussion they read it and move on. I do this with hundreds of really good, interesting, informative articles each week just because I don’t have anything topical to say about them or because I just don’t have time to blog and forget about it.

These systems don’t find the long tail, they don’t find what I’m interested in because they have no idea who I am or what I’m interested in. I know that though and I’ve currently got 112 different sources of mostly relevant news being delivered direct to my news reader. Each of them regularly linking off to other sources of similar information that I might want to add to my list. Why do I need help finding more sources of information?