This whole 'space', of real-time news clustering, is one that I anticipate a lot of growth in this year. As I wrote back in September:
"My bet is that mainstream news media organizations will be beating a path to Gabe's door to either invest in it or license the software."
I'm actually somewhat surprised that mainstream media hasn't taken more notice of this space already - perhaps they need to hire someone like me to keep on top of these 2.0 things for them ;-) Anywho, here's my impressions of the current crop of meme trackers, using their Technology tracks as a comparison point.
Has 6 distinct categories so far, including a newly launched 'Television' category. Plus 'World' and 'Health' are on the way apparently. Interface needs more work - they don't cluster results and some topics appear more than once in different places - e.g. currently Engadget's Citizen's reversible atomic clock post is at number 13, 14, 15 all at once.
The Annotated New York Times tracks blog postings that cite articles published by The New York Times. Interesting way to remix the NY Times and bring in external citations. I especially like the "On the move..." column on the homepage, for stories that are increasing in popularity. Has a large array of topics, but somehow the NY Times filter makes me feel like I'm missing out on breaking news...
Desperately needs to work on their layout - pretty plain list format. Also there is no topic focus. Features I do like: most clicked on in BlogsNow; most linked to flickr pages; most linked to in the IMDB (but why is Groundhog Day currently #2?!!); most linked to wikipedia pages. All in all, some promising features - but needs more focus and better layout.
Nice layout, seems a little bit slower than tech.meme - e.g. Sifry's State of the Blogosphere is number 7 here but currently #1 on meme. The inclusion of excerpts doesn't really work for me - makes the page too busy (even though hidden behind an expand/collapse button). I like the tag cloud and inclusion of Flickr pics.
Megite is very comprehensive, but I think it needs to find ways to reduce the 'busy-ness' of the page. The #1 FON story (at time of writing) totally dominates the page and it took me 3-4 scrolls to get to number 2 on the list! Megite needs to learn how to layout its clustering, a lesson which Memeorandum learnt back in September. You know, people diss meme's layout - but when it comes to cluster layouts, Memeorandum is still streets ahead of its competition.
Well I feel a bit guilty now for once again showing my bias towards Memeorandum. But note that it's not a bias towards Gabe (who is a friend, I admit), but towards the technology. It's just faster and better presented - currently - than its competition.
Newroo (pre-launch)
er, nice kangaroo... Nothing else to report thus far.
Has Superbowl #1, Sifry #2, FON #3 - which is pretty good. I'd rate this number 3 behind Memeorandum and Topix.net (see below) right now, but again I have issues with the layout. Too much information. The excerpts are a nice idea, and presented fairly well on TailRank, but to be honest they quickly become a blur. My intention with a meme tracker is to quickly scan information - and excerpts just get in the way. However TailRank at least tries to minimize this... maybe just needs more refining.
I suspect it needs more topic focus too, but then it seems to be aiming for this with its tagging feature. I dunno... I like TailRank and what it sets out to do, but I just feel it isn't quite there yet.
Has a wide variety of topics, as you'd expect. Not really a clustering service as such, so unfair to compare it to memeorandum or tailrank. Ranks articles by "Recent Authority" by default, so is biased towards A-List blogs. But I use Technorati's tag features quite often to find new stories, so for what it does Technorati Kitchen is very useful.
Tinfinger (pre-launch)
Empty pages currently. Hurry up Paul! Less talk, more action ;-) I know, pot calling kettle black...
My number 2 pick behind meme. I haven't written enough about Topix.net, but I love this service. The mix of 'official' news and blogs is now very compelling. And the Tech page for instance has a wide range of techie topics covered - Linux, security, programming, etc. I give Topix.net high marks for coverage and it is also presented nicely. If anything, I'd like to see more done with story clustering - especially now that it includes blogs. An under-rated resource, IMO.
This is one of the forerunners of news clustering sites and is mainly focused on politics and non-tech subjects. But the techie meme cluster servcies listed above could take a few notes from TLB - nice 3-column layout on its topic pages, interesting use of graphs too.
Summary
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!
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