One of Microsoft Technical Evangelist’s and Channel 9 video guy’s, Robert Scoble, legendary traits is his power reading/tracking of 1,000+ RSS sources. He still claims to do that, but has “dumped his linkblog” in favor of a new, online newspaper of sorts called Memeorandum.

Readers will note from the screenshot of the headline that even Scoble is having a hard time spelling Memeorandum. Wonder if this will be one of its Achille’s heels, but then del.icio.us isn’t exactly easy to type either and that has gained better than cult status. Hopefully Memeorandum creator and developer, Gabe Rivera, will offer some easier to get to domain to reach, if not, be sure folks to bookmark it now and carefully note the spelling. This site seems focused on requiring repeated refreshing and resurfing of the web page.

Memeorandum is currently split into two different types: tech.memeorandum (tech meme heretofore) and politics.memeorandum. Tech meme works off a list of unpublished (?) blogs and sources, tracking who is linking to who in an effort to determine the page sorting order. This is similar to Google News that doesn’t officially publish its list of sources, but states the number of sources at 4,500. Tech meme doesn’t list even a number of sources. There is a blog though, so maybe there it is listed there.

Something interesting I noticed about the tech meme page is that you can refresh it in snapshots (see red arrow in screenshot). If you always visit the home page you won’t see these snapshots, nor the search to seek out past ones. But if you find a page you like, you can just hit refresh and bookmark the time. The archive rolls for 24 hours, so you can watch a hot story and/or blog entry rise or fall off the page, and those who link to it. The eBay/PayPal/Skype story I wrote about yesterday was linked on today’s tech meme, for example.

However, the story I wrote in the last entry and linked to regarding the iTunes 5.0 Windows upgrade problems still hasn’t show after 30 minutes of linking and trackbacking in, so I’m not sure how long it takes for the tech meme algorithm to grab trackbacks or linking-in permalinks. It might use other ping sources like Technorati or aggregators like Feedster or IceRocket, rather than visiting the blogs directly. That will leave sources out of sync as evidenced by this test. Then again, nobody has linked to my story, so maybe that’s what triggers the tech.memeorandum page, which would leave it less open to trackback spammers (a good thing, of course). I see new stories/blog entries on the main tech meme page as recent as “10 minutes ago” but the tech meme official blog notes “added in real time” and page updates every five minutes.

My opinion? Jury still out. It seems to miss timely inclusion of sources linking in which might provide valid points/counterpoints to a featured article, but I haven’t used it enough (the one example here is hardly empirical evidence).

Therefore, I’m going to continue to use this as a source to monitor because maybe I’ll find something of interest I’ve missed in the 350+ RSS sources I routinely scan. This morning in my first use it provided a story I hadn’t seen — and blogged about, so from that standpoint it’s already proved useful. Ironically, the tech meme itself doesn’t produce an RSS feed (it does, keep reading) which means users must return to the home page and refresh to see the page.

Also, no ads on the page(s) yet, which will probably change once enough and/or if people start bookmarking the site. I’m skeptical of any service that has no clear financial model. Skype and Flickr — two services which ultimately reached a buyout payday both had stable financial models. Technorati, which many have speculated (myself included) seems poised for a buyout, doesn’t seem to have a stable financial model.

Update 11:09 PDT: As of 2pm ET, tech memeorandum just updated with the link from this blog to Scoble’s story as well as the other one questioned. This was after Warner Crocker trackbacked to the link for the iTunes 5.0 Windows (Warner didn’t actually add a link to his blog to my blog entry though). He commented too on the post. This experiment resulted in an approximately three hour delay between the original link and showing up on tech.memeorandum. The link showed up in a prominent location when it did show up.

Update 2:38 PDT: Turns out there is an RSS feed for tech.memorandum:

• How to improve Memeorandum
• Google News outted from beta
• Experiment reveals how fast Google News links breaking news
• What is *your* blog about? Why should we b-roll you?
• Can Scoble prove that his blog can turn a site from PR0 to PR5?
• Hey Shelley, here’s a link from a guy!