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13 months ago Read/WriteWeb published a review post about the leading “meme trackers” – i.e. sites that cluster and filter the latest tech news. My conclusion at that time was that Techmeme came out on top, closely followed by Tailrank and Topix.net. My summary back then:
“All in all, Memeorandum still comes out trumps in terms of clustering layout, speed and relevancy. Topix.net and TailRank are strong services too. Also I suspect Chuquet and Megite will pick up the pace once they’ve enhanced their interfaces. A very interesting space to watch!”
Later in 2006 I also compared TailRank to Techmeme. But it’s over a year since the original analysis and so time for an update. I have to admit that personally I’ve stuck with TechMeme, although I check out the others every now and then too. To do a proper update would take me at least a few hours of research. Luckily Stan Schroeder over at franticindustries has saved me the trouble, by publishing an in-depth overview of the Memetracker market, circa 2007. Stan covers 8 memetrackers: Blogniscient, Buzzfeed, Chuquet, Daily Rotation,Feedable, Megite, Tailrank, Techmeme.
Stan’s conclusion is that Techmeme, Tailrank and Megite are the leading three memetrackers, because “they have more features, index more sites, and bring the news faster than the rest.”. He also noted that Daily Rotation (a customizable news aggregator) and Buzzfeed (adds its own editorial commentary) “are a bit different than others”.
Stan did a little test at the end of his article, which pretty much shows the current state of the memetrackers:
“While I was writing this article, a very important news item broke: Viacom’s lawsuit against Google. I was following the technology sections of all 8 memetrackers. Techmeme picked up the news first, soon to be followed by Megite and Tailrank. Daily Rotation and Feedable followed soon, while Chuquet was yet a bit more slower, and Blogniscient hasn’t picked up this news item even several hours after it broke out.”
My experience has also been that Techmeme is usually the fastest, although I’ve taken to referring to the top stories on there as “Techmeme scrums” – because when a top story breaks, there is a massive ‘me too’ pile on from tech blogs. It’s the same on TailRank and Megite – and this trend is getting a little tiresome. Why? Because the business type stories (like the current Cisco-Webex one dominating the news) tend to obscure the real web tech stories too much… but that’s just me.
This is why I supplement my Techmeme diet with the likes of Topix.net Tech (not profiled by Stan) and my personal RSS filter feeds, which give me more variety and largely keep the ‘me too’ news blogs out of my results. Also I get a great daily fix of headlines from OriginalSignal, which has a good variety of pages now.
What do you think of the memetrackers and which is your favorite?
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Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)