Michael Arrington over at Techcrunch has been writing about what he calls “the memorandum killers“. There’s also a related article on Mashable. Memorandum is a site that tracks the popularity of web pages – normally pages from blogs. A meme is a hot topic on the web, something that goes viral.
Tracking the hot topics on the web is great, as things spread like wildfire and I (like many geeks) want to keep abreast of the latest news and technological advances. But what is worthy of being filtered to the top and what isn’t? As the article says:
…they [the meme tracking webites] rely on user voting or other algorithms to determine relevance.
Which, as you can appreciate, isn’t a foolproof method. But what’s the alternative? Employ editors? No, they can be biased as easily as the net bloke. Plus they need paying. Hmm, it’s a quandary.
So, anyone got any better ideas?