IP Democracy: Memeorandum: Great for Tech, A Question about Politics

Michael Arrington believes “Memeorandum is Changing the Web”. For those not familiar with it, the Memeorandum site has two sections, one covering politics, the other technology.

Memeorandum finds blog posts, newspaper articles and press releases that are being heavily linked to in near real time and puts them up on the site. The position and size of the headline is indicative of its importance (determined by number of links and other factors, such as how much people are writing about the linked content). The higher up and bigger the headline, the more important it is. And linking sites, the conversation, are clustered underneath the headline. This means you can find out in near real time what is important in technology (or politics), how important it is, and who’s talking about it…If I have limited time and I need to find out what’s going on, I turn to Memeorandum.

Like Arrington, I highly recommend the Tech section of Memeorandum. Though I haven’t spent much time on the Politics page, a question came to mind one day when I was looking for coverage of some political event. As I scanned the page’s listings, I wondered how Memeorandum’s ranking system deals with reported differences between the “conservative” and “progressive” sectors of the political blogosphere. According to a report by two bloggers from within the progressive camp:

Progressive blogs allow for greater interactivity with bloggers in their websites, including more comments, diaries, polls, requests for feedback, and chatting features that allow for the creation of communities within individual blogs…[while] Conservative blogs have a tendency to link to discussions on other blogs more often than progressive blogs.

If this is true, it makes me wonder whether Memeorandum’s ranking system is likely to favor one or another of these two blogging communities based on the different forms their respective “conversations” employ most intensively—the progressive sites relying more on intra-site dialogs, and the conservative sites making heavier use of inter-site links.

Posted by Mitch Shapiro on October 13, 2005 7:07 PM to IP Democracy