Memeorandum‘s Gabe Rivera was interviewed by Don Dodge from Microsoft. I found this comparison with Slashdot, Digg, Reddit interesting:
“For readers of Digg (or Reddit, and to some extent, Slashdot), I’d say Memeorandum is:
– More focused (on either “Tech” or “Politics”)
– More expert/authority-driven
– Better organized, visually
Of course for a certain type of reader, Digg’s quirkiness, developer orientation, and community are all pluses. Many who aren’t as interested in these things prefer Memeorandum. Many use both sites. It’s all good!”
As I found out when interviewing digg’s Kevin Rose, the ‘focus’ aspect is soon coming to digg – as they expand out from just tech news. The organization/design issue is one Slashdot/digg/reddit might quibble with, but where I think Gabe nails the difference is when he says Memeorandum is more “expert/authority-driven”. Although this is precisely the thing that has proven most controversial in Memeorandum, as accusations of A-List favoritism and group gaming fly. But as Gabe mentioned further into the interview with Don, Memeorandum is by nature a filter. And I think he has a point…
Strong individual voices will emerge and eventually be discovered by Memeorandum’s type of filtering, whereas with digg and Slashdot individual points-of-view are more likely to be drowned out by the ‘voice of the community’. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, because a lot of times the wisdom of the masses lives up to its moniker. But the ‘wisdom of the filters’ approach of Memeorandum is much more of a threat to tradional broadcast media, because it bubbles up new expert voices and ‘edge’ stories.
Incidentally, a Memeorandum competitor has emerged – the weirdly named Megite (but at least it’s easy to spell!). TechCrunch says its a contender already – and indeed I found some useful links from it this morning. One to watch…
A final note, Adam Green is doing some mashup experiments with Memeorandum. I can’t wait to see the results of that!
