Probably you’ve already noted Memeorandum, which collects the most "popular" topics that bloggers write about, and provides you with "global" discussion threads across different blogs. Nice thought. Look here for the principles behind it.
But I wonder what will be the result when everyone will be reading Memeorandum itself. Topics which are popular will become even more popular just because they are popular, making that topic occupy more space in the blogosphere than what it would have gotten otherwise.
An interesting thought experiment would be let Memeorandum run without anyone watching it. What would be the difference from letting everyone see it?
So my prediction is that we’ll see what’s very popular in a larger quantity than what corresponds to how popular it is, and then not much of the "slightly less popular".
The only way out I can see is that Memeorandum somehow includes a compensating factor, so that the more popular a topic is, the harder it is for more of it to get into Memeorandum. Something like that. Perhaps they’re doing this already, who knows?
Filed under: Blogging |
Popular stuff will become even more popular? A little bit, but each item can only stay on Memeorandum for 24 hours. It decays off of the page after that.
So, if you want to be popular on Memeorandum you have to get people to link to you every single day. That’s not as easy as you might think, particularly in a hot news day (like tomorrow when there’ll be quite a number of Web 2.0 announcements).
That seems like a good compensating factor; I didn’t know about that. Let’s hope it’ll be sufficient! I think not, but I don’t yet have any good arguments for my opinion.
The “Memeorandum trap” is definitely a case of “popular stuff getting even more popular”:
http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2005/10/21/memeorandum-gets-more-hype-and-new-feature/
The “Memeorandum trap” is definitely a case of “popular stuff getting even more popular”:
http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2005/10/21/memeorandum-gets-more-hype-and-new-feature/