The Rise of the Memetrackers
Has Memeorandum got competition? Over the last few months, a number of services have sprung up to help us find the most talked-about news of the moment. Time for a check-up on the state of the memeosphere... Memeorandum - If you're into tech or US politics, Memeorandum is unbeatable.
Context & Ripple Effects
The memeosphere has been contested ground since last October, when Blogniscient squared off against Memeorandum and blog news services were openly 'fighting it out' for the job of ranking what the blogosphere is talking about. Memeorandum won that round decisively enough that Don Dodge's interview with founder Gabe Rivera the day before treated it as part of a daily reading habit checked several times a day.
What changed this week is the framing: Mashable's check-up and TechCrunch's parallel piece on 'The Memeorandum Hunters' treat a fresh wave of clipper services not as curiosities but as a competitive field forming around an incumbent. That two outlets ran the same roundup on the same day signals the category has reached the stage where challengers, not just the leader, are the story.
First-order effects
- Memeorandum now has named competition in both of its strongholds — tech and US politics — ending its run as the only serious automated tracker of blog conversation.
- Rivera's 'clipper' rivals each attack the news-clipping problem from a slightly different angle than Memeorandum, so readers choosing among trackers are really choosing between ranking methodologies.
Second-order effects
- Bloggers gain bargaining leverage: as more services compete over which posts surface as memes, getting clipped by any one aggregator becomes a traffic event worth optimizing for.
- Each challenger is pushed toward differentiation on curation approach rather than imitation, since the coverage consensus holds that Memeorandum is unbeatable at its current game.
Third-order effects
- If the field holds, algorithmic aggregation becomes a standing layer between bloggers and their audiences — a structural shift from hand-edited link blogs toward services that decide visibility by machine.
- The pattern points toward consolidation around whichever tracker best balances automation with editorial credibility, with Memeorandum setting the benchmark every entrant is measured against.
The trend: Automated memetrackers are hardening into a distinct product category for real-time news discovery, with Memeorandum as the reference point a growing pack of clippers is chasing.