Gillmor Gang: Memeorandum and the future of media
Gabe Rivera of Memeorandum joined a partially populated Gillmor Gang (Steve, myself, Doc Searls and Mike Arrington-Jon Udell, Mike Vizard and Dana Gardner unavailable) podcast on Friday. As I said during the show, I'm a fan of Memeorandum.
Context & Ripple Effects
Memeorandum founder Gabe Rivera is in the middle of a three-day media run: an interview with Don Dodge on February 3, then TechCrunch's Memeorandum Hunters piece and Mashable's take on the rise of the memetrackers on February 4, capped by Friday's Gillmor Gang appearance. The arc is a wave of new 'clipper' services surfacing hot news automatically, all circling a category Memeorandum effectively defined.
The podcast booking matters because of who is around the table — Steve Gillmor, Doc Searls, Mike Arrington — the same A-list bloggers whose link behavior feeds the aggregator itself. The host's on-air declaration that he checks Memeorandum several times a day, echoed in the earlier interview with Rivera, shows the service already embedded in the daily routine of the people it covers.
First-order effects
- Rivera gains direct access to the tech-blog elite that both produces and is ranked by his aggregator, reinforcing Memeorandum's standing at exactly the moment rivals are attacking the category.
- The partially staffed lineup — with Arrington/Udell, Vizard, and Gardner absent — hands more airtime to a Memeorandum defense on a show whose hosts are themselves heavy users.
Second-order effects
- The new memetracking entrants profiled this week are pushed to differentiate their clipping angles rather than compete head-on, given the consensus that Memeorandum is unbeatable for tech and US politics news.
- Attention economy feedback tightens for bloggers: appearing on the Gang while being aggregated by Memeorandum makes the aggregator's ranking choices part of the conversation about the rankings themselves.
Third-order effects
- If the memetracker pattern holds, front-page news judgment migrates from human editors to algorithms, and media legitimacy gets negotiated on shows like this one between the people building the aggregators and the publishers they reorder.
- The category could consolidate around a dominant automated aggregator per vertical, with challengers relegated to niche angles — a structure where whoever owns the meme-ranking owns distribution.
The trend: Tech news curation is shifting from human-edited front pages to automated memetrackers, with Memeorandum setting the template its imitators must work around.