Techmeme & Fast Look At Other Meme Trackers

Technically, Friday is my day off. No search blogging for me. But while I work on other stuff, I can't help but keep an eye on the news. Unfortunately, my favorite site to summarize what's going on, Techmeme, has felt sluggish of late.

Consistently this week, I've seen stories (from across the blogosphere) that normally (in my opinion) would have hit within a few hours take a day or longer. Not in every case, but generally it has felt sluggish. Maybe it's just me. If not, I know Gabe who runs the site will get it humming along in short order. But it did prompt me to take a look at a few other meme trackers.

I started with Richard MacManus's list here, along with another one over at Mashable. I'm going to keep an eye on these over time, but fast first impressions:

Megite: Nice. I like how you get a main story, then clusters of related stories under the key items.

Tailrank: Same thing, nice how you've got related items under the main topics, though they take up much more space than at Megite.

Chuquet: Immediately unimpressed that the third item is about the Google Docs & Spreadsheet launch from ages ago. Lots and lots of related information in very condensed for each topic, but these use the blog names, rather than headline names, so hard to know what's going on.

Blogniscient: No related items shown for main topics, which is disappointing. I like related items, because it gives me a sense of how important a story is becoming. But, a nice, clean interface.

Still, I like Techmeme best of all. The other sites are all about scrolling. Techmeme is effectively a newspaper front page, where I can at a glance see everything it thinks is important at a particular time. I like that. I want to check back several times during the day and read the latest "edition," not scroll and scroll through what's been happening.

So Techmeme is usually rather zippy about big stories, but can be leisurely with items of second-order importance. Maybe there's just been a preponderance of the latter these days? Not sure, but I'll look a little closer at this.

What's a "meme tracker"?

Comment by Gabe | November 10, 2006 9:28 PM

Hey Gabe!

I actually found it the opposite. This week, there were some things I thought were big stories that I'd find directly reading some of the blogs I visit, then like six hours later, I'd finally see them working up Techmeme. Normally, it's often felt the opposite. So I wondered if maybe you were tweaking something.

I wish I could remember the examples, of course! That would help. I'll keep an eye on things and if I notice, will send you an email.

Overall, it still remains great. Meme tracker isn't my term but one I take to me some service that lets you understand the memes or themes or big discussions happening on the web in a particular moment. That's what Techmeme rocks for me with -- giving me that at a glance. When I was on vacation last week and before, I could pop into Techmeme once a day and with stuff easily.

Comment by Danny Sullivan | November 10, 2006 11:19 PM

Before reading this post, Tailrank was the only one of these meme trackers that I had heard of, even though I had never visited it. Following your cue, I opened up a Firefox tab to Techmeme. And sure enough, the first article was about something I hadn't seen anywhere else. Thanks for the tip. I'm adding Techmeme to my bookmarks.

Comment by Scott Johnson | November 18, 2006 10:00 AM

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