A Short Memetracker Comparison
7. January 2007 – 23:05 byKeeping up-to-date with the most discussed topics in the blogosphere is not easy. Of course, you can subscribe to an endless list of blogs and other news resources in your feed reader but it is most likely you will miss a great story. You just cannot cover all relevant blogs and therefore stories which might meet your interests.
Resorting to search engines like Google and Yahoo or more specialised blog search engines like Technorati and Sphere might be an idea but it is just beneficial if you want to know more about a single topic. Though if you want to cover a wider field like technology you are doomed. Which terms to query?
The solution are memetrackers. They aggregate a multitude of blogs and group related stories so you can easily follow discussion over a multitude of blogs. If you want to know more about the meaning of meme have a look at the Wikipedia article.
For this blog post I concentrate on three trackers which cover technology.
Megite
Besides technology Megite tracks various other topics like politics, fashion, and finance. Recently they have added video as well.
Covered stories are well structured. First, there is the main story with an excerpt of the blog post and links directly to the story, the blog’s homepage, and a permalink to it on Megite. Referring blog posts to the original story - Discussion - and related articles are listed underneath and separated from each other.
Though I don’t like the images on the right side of each story. They derive from the original article and are often blurred because of image resizing. Actually it looks cheap and doesn’t add any value. I could really live without it.
Of course, you can subscribe to Megite by RSS. Though this is Megite’s real shortcoming. It is simply updated too often. Since the last time I had a look at Bloglines (maybe two hours ago) and marked all items read, Megite generated 200 new unread items. Luckily Bloglines stops at 200 items. In the same period of time Techmeme generated three unread items and Tailrank eight.
Though there are not 200 different stories now. The same story is four or five times there. Really unnecessary. Similar to the Megite site the RSS feed also provides a short excerpt of each story, a link to Megite and also the image from the article which looks actually better in the feed than on the site.
Other features of Megite include a River of News which provides a constant flow of new stories, and the possibility of creating a personalised Megite by linking to your own OPML file. Though I have not tested this feature yet.
Tailrank
Tailrank is the brainchild of Kevin Burton. It also features different topics like politics, entertainment, and video.
Tailrank uses a different approach to structure stories. There is the main article with an excerpt of the story as well as a link to the article itself. Also there is a link to all articles referring to the original. Another link provides tracking of the story so you are able to keep up-to-date with it. You can either bookmark it, subscribe by RSS or even receive alerts by AOL Instant Messenger (I assume it works, never tried it myself). Really cool.
Tailrank also provides a link for each story that might be a little bit misleading at first. Let’s assume there is a story from TechCrunch featured on Tailrank. So there is a link in bold letters marked as techcrunch.com. However this link doesn’t lead to TechCrunch’s homepage rather to another site which lists all TechCrunch stories which were featured on Tailrank. Funnily I have just discovered it while writing this blog post. I never clicked on those links before because I was assuming they lead to the respective websites.
Tailrank lists three to four referring articles with story excerpts underneath the original article in a light-grey coloured box. So they are easily distinguishable from the original article. On the right side of the articles there are screenshots from the sites. Those look better than the images on Megite and don’t annoy me. However they are hardly readable.
Breaking news and top news from the previous day are listed on the right side of the site and provide a quick overview on what is and was interesting. You can add your own OPML file to customise Tailrank. There are more options to add the file than on Megite, though. It is also possible to read news on your mobile phone.
The RSS feed looks similar to the Megite one. A story excerpt and the screenshot of the site as well as the link to Tailrank. I don’t like the ads in the feed, though. At the moment there is an ad for the New York Times in every second item. I’ve got used to it but at first those ads look like as if they were part of the article.
Techmeme
The last memetracker covered here is Gabe Rivera’s Techmeme, which is part his Memeorandum sites.
The third memetracker, the third approach to structure stories. Like the previous mentioned trackers there is a summary of the original story together with links to the story itself, to the homepage, and a permalink to Techmeme. Though there are hardly any images featured which is quite refreshing. There are also links to blogs discussing the article, and to blogs which feature related content.
A very handy feature is Link Search. It provides links to five popular blog search engines: Google Blogsearch, Ask Blogsearch, Technorati, Sphere, and IceRocket. So users are able to search for more blogs discussing the topic. Nice. Link Search can be enabled by clicking the Preferences link.
On the right side of Techmeme there is a new item finder which is like Breaking News on Tailrank. Though this finder hides another excellent feature. If you click on Extend timeline there is a link to Techmeme River which is nicely structured and lists the top stories of the last five days. I just don’t understand why this useful feature isn’t displayed more easily accessible on the site.
In my opinion Techmeme provides the best RSS feed because you can directly click through to the original story, to the homepage of the site, and to Techmeme as well, of course. The feed looks really good.
Hopefully I have mentioned most features of those trackers. Anyway, I like Techmeme the best because it is the most accessible of the three contenders and just features the essential stories. One might argue that it concentrates too heavily on “A-list” blogs and therefore other interesting stories could be missing. That’s true, of course.
Tailrank is following closely. Like Megite it aggregates more sources than Techmeme and is a good choice when you want to broaden the spectrum of covered blogs. Megite is not bad at all, though its RSS feed makes it almost unusable for me.
7 Responses to “A Short Memetracker Comparison”
We’re probably going to be removing the ads. It was essentially just an experiment.
Glad you like the screenshots. They aren’t designed to be readable just to give you a sense of the URL you’re about to visit. Basically if it’s linking to CNN you can see with just a glance.
By Kevin Burton on Jan 8, 2007
I loove Techmeme. Visit it every day. a few times.
By marcel weiss on Jan 8, 2007
I wouldn’t mind if there were no ads in the feed. Especially for Tailrank it is probably not necessary at all because if there is an interesting story I have to go to Tailrank if I want to follow discussion.
By Carsten Pötter on Jan 8, 2007