Memewars
Meme-trackers are curious beasts. Since I first discovered memeorandum.com a couple years back, I have been keenly studying them and their full-text clustering algorithms.
Yesterday’s News, Today.
The basic meme-tracker premise is simple – they scour the blogosphere & newsosphere for the latest action so you don’t have to.
While they are all reasonably successful at it, I don’t think they have quite nailed the vision just yet, in the same way that AltaVista & InfoSeek didn't quite solve the web information retrieval problem. I say that because I keep finding myself drifting back to sites like Slashdot & Gizmag because they know stuff that the meme-trackers will never tell me.
The root cause is that most meme-trackers utilize inbound link weight for their ranking system in some way or another. Whether it is based on naïve 1st order link count, the recursive PageRank random surfer model or extracting bipartite authority graphs, they all share the same problem - emerging topics are not heavily linked to begin with and not all interesting topics attract sufficient links over time.
In short, too much reliance on inbound link weight can result in a lot of missed information with the remainder being delivered quite slowly.
BuzzTracker sold for $5M
Recently, when Yahoo purchased buzztracker.com for $5M that placed a valuation on the meme-tracker landscape. Assuming that valuation is a function of eyeballs, then based on Quantcast’s data, Technorati could be worth $700M. Going by Alexa's data, Technorati could be worth as much as $1.3B.
So who is winning?
Here is a list of meme-trackers, along with their current Alexa Rank & Quantcast Reach data.
Of the top 3 (according to Alexa), Technorati & Feedster both started life as blog search engines and have only recently evolved into meme-trackers. Topix on the other hand will probably evolve itself off the list soon as it is looking more and more like a social media site.
This is the relative ranking of the meme world through Alexa’s eyes:
(NB: I have ignored Google News, partly because Alexa won’t report on them separately but mainly because they are now morphing into a destination news site rather than an aggregator).
My Favourite
I have found myself returning to originalsignal.com & cloudee.com quite regularly. They both pickup the big headlines on the sites I am interested faster and with more consistency than anyone else. I still haven’t decided whether that is because of algorithmic smarts, or because the subset of feeds they watch are similar to those feeds that I would have otherwise subscribed to.