Paul Kedrosky’s line of thinking in his post entitled Pimp Your Blog to Memeorandum raises some interesting questions when examining the situation closer. I’ve been following tech.memeorandum (hereafter referred to as TM) with some fascination the last few months since it became public. Overall, I like the service and one way that I can give back to the service is by offering some constructive feedback. At the end, I’ll make specific recommendations if readers wish to skip to the payoff.

My perspective has been more from a fellow developer point of view than a webmaster/blogger view. However from a webmaster stance a contrarian viewpoint can be reached to Mr. Kedrosky’s theory that bloggers go to tech.memeorandum to see whatever is getting top billing for the day and write about it “whether they care about the subject or not” just so they can get some Meme recip link love. Some shallow bloggers may do just that, sure, and those sources, I’m sure TM creator Gabe Rivera would like not to appear, or show up way late in the story moving down/off the page. These type of sources degrade the overall quality of the service.

Human readers can rather easily spot/scan posts that have their own unique viewpoint and take on the subject vs. posts which link to a story and have little to no original blogger commentary. Memeorandum seems to look at that as well and while evaluating word count seems to be one factor in its algorithm, that isn’t the only factor.

Maybe something like Mechanical Turk could assist with: weeding out and/or penalizing authorities that make these type of bare bones “me too” posts. I don’t want to read them, they are a waste of my time. Unless it’s some sort of black or white poll, I really don’t care if Blogger A agrees with Blogger B and Blogger C if that’s all Blogger A’s post has to contribute, even if Blogger A is the most popular and linked-to blogger in the source list.

TM Experiment
You can try the following experiment yourself. Anybody can, which is the beauty of testing these things yourself and drawing your own conclusions about how systems like memeorandum really work. Here’s what you can do:

1) Watch your RSS reader for a hot, fresh story you are interested in and then check memeorandum for it not being linked there yet. If it’s linked there already, then you are too late, sorry. Keep looking. Not there? Proceed to #2.
2) Now, write about and link to the source.
3) Check memeorandum again: is it linked by anybody else yet? Yes? Darn too late again, go back to #1. No? Good, now publish your story. You have become the seed.
4) Now wait and see if the link is picked up by some other bloggers and if it is a good one and technology-related it just might be. Then watch how long and/or where you show up in the list. If the other bloggers in the source list do not link to you, then you may not appear in the list at all, even if you were the first person to write about and link to the story.

How much TM traffic, really?
I can’t speak for every blogger listed there, of course, but Memeorandum recip traffic for this blog is neglible to overall site traffic numbers. The site stats here are public and you can view the referrers yourself and see what I see. As you might expect, the pyramid effect is in play here: the most traffic goes to the primary source with the biggest link (often a MSM story) and a reduction of traffic proportionally from where the linked in blogs are on the page. On those rare occasions (a handful of times in the last few months) that this blog has been the main source link, traffic has been much more significant.

Value that I derive from TM
Memeorandum makes it easier after I’ve often already seen/read other blogger’s posts in my RSS aggregator to quote what I found interesting and unique from others on the same topic, if the story/source is there (and about 70% of the time it seems to be). It is an aggregator of aggregators. A mashup of what the 400+ sources I read are writing about and/or interested in.

This is what makes Memeorandum useful to me. It’s a tool for finding and reading about what I am already motivated in writing about and more easily picking out interesting quotes and points from the collective conversation.

In some cases I see so much coverage at Memeorandum that I will scrap writing about the subject altogether. If there is nothing of value, no side story, historical or unique perspective that I can add to the discussion, I’ll either shelve the post or reduce it to a one liner in a somewhat related post.

Checking the time/date stamps on posts
Lastly, I’ve noticed that sometimes there can be a rather dramatic delay in time posted to showing up at Memeorandum, if at all. So what may appear to the casual eye as everybody writing about something to get onto Memeorandum may also be everybody writing at about the same time quoting the same story from their RSS reader and offering their take and Memeorandum seeing the linking pattern and elevating the story with the linking in activity based on its own authority algorithm.

So is that the cart before the horse or the horse before the cart?

In fact on more than one occasion I’ve noticed a similar opinion as mine echoed on Memeorandum first that was written/published several hours *after* I’d already written/posted and yet these other blogs showed up there first. And more often than not these other bloggers aren’t linking to my post, so there are only a couple of logical conclusions one can make:

1) the blogger had a similar line of thinking and it took them longer to write and post their thoughts than I
2) saw my post and linked in and then offered additional commentary. Memeorandum picked that blogger up before picking up my original post because its bot hadn’t seen my post first. When this happens Memeorandum does seem to give more weight to my post, but if they didn’t link, my post may not show up at all, or might come later (see #3)
3) they saw my post and decided to reword and post themselves, but *not* link to my post, and memeorandum posted their take first. Those that don’t pay attention to time/date stamps on post can get the wrong idea submliminally about who wrote what first. Fortunately, date/time stamps tell the real story if folks look closely enough of who wrote what when. Whenever I see a post very similar to mine in perspective, just different words (I’m not claiming plagiarism here, that’s a totally different story), I look at the date/time stamp on the post and compare to mine. Posts made at MakeYouGoHmm are all server time which is EST (GMT- 5).

So who is echoing who? Only the date/timestamps of post provide these answers and in the case where bloggers can manipulate the timestamps? Well, guess you have to go to when these posts are first seen by the pinging engines. It’s an interesting technical problem for RSS aggregators.

Wish list feature for Memeorandum
All this way to arrive at a feature I wish Memeorandum had (my Xmas TM wish): time/date stamping sorting for each linked in entry *when they are first published* so that readers (and bloggers) can determine who wrote what when. Currently stories after relevance are ranked/sorted by Memeorandum authority which can be very misleading if you analyze date/time stamps of the actual posted entries closer. It might also be useful for a correlation between when Memeorandum posted vs. the time the post was published so that readers and bloggers could sort the data that way.

Also, a quality rating system by non-biased humans (not the bloggers being listed), perhaps Mechanical Turk based which would help weed out sources who are not adding to the conversation much beyond “me too” just to get listed which concerned Mr. Kedrosky. A completely automated system would be nice, but put me in the crowd that believes at least some level of human involvement (in addition to the developer’s direct input) woudl improve the overall system quality.

Think I might send this request to Gabe directly, if he doesn’t pick up on this one first. Thank you for the useful service, Gabe!

Did this post make you go hmm?

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