The Memeorandum Hunters
I've written about two new real-time news aggregators today, Megite and Newroo. — The space is clearly hot, with both funded and unfunded companies rushing to release products. The goal? Leverage all of the great edge blog content out there …
Context & Ripple Effects
The memetracker race is compressing into weeks: Memeorandum founder Gabe Rivera sat for an interview with Don Dodge just yesterday, and today TechCrunch and Mashable are both writing up the same wave of challengers — Megite and Newroo, two new real-time aggregators built to surface the best of blog content automatically.
This isn't the first attempt on Memeorandum's turf; back in October 2005 the Blogniscient comparison framed the category as a fight already underway, and coverage of the rise of the memetrackers describes a space hot enough that both funded and unfunded teams are shipping products simultaneously.
First-order effects
- Memeorandum now has two confirmed entrants — Megite and Newroo — explicitly hunting its real-time news-aggregation turf, turning a near-solo benchmark into a contested category overnight.
- For bloggers, the gatekeepers of tech-news visibility multiply: whichever algorithm clusters and ranks the 'edge' content decides which independent voices get traffic.
Second-order effects
- Earlier challengers like Blogniscient, written up in October 2005, are no longer competing against one incumbent but against a crowding field — forcing every player to differentiate on ranking quality rather than mere existence.
- With funded and unfunded companies rushing in per TechCrunch's read of the space, attention itself becomes the scarce input: memetracker placements start shaping which stories the funding conversation and the blogosphere amplify next.
Third-order effects
- If the entry pattern holds, blog news aggregation consolidates around algorithmic front pages that function as de facto editors for the tech web — a structural shift from human-curated link blogging toward machine-ranked distribution whose winner is far from settled among this many contenders.
The trend: Tech-news distribution is shifting from hand-curated link blogs to automated real-time memetrackers, with Memeorandum's approach setting the template that a widening pack of entrants is racing to replicate.