Memeorandum and Blogniscient

Want to read “the most relevant items from thousands of news sites and weblogs” or to “find the needle in the blog haystack” - memeorandum and Blogniscient are your answers.

These aren’t blog search engines like Technorati and IceRocket. Instead they aim to give a snapshot of the blogosphere’s biggest buzz by highlighting the topics and voices that are receiving the most traffic.

Memeorandum is a play on the word “meme”. Loosely defined, a meme is a self-propagating idea (you can read much more about memes on Wikipedia but I think it will make your head hurt). Memeorandum comes in two flavors - Politics and Tech. Tech enthusiasts in particular have really grabbed a hold of memeorandum, stating that it has changed their life. You can read much more about memeorandum on TechCrunch.

Although presently less well-known, Blogniscient does something very similar. There are a couple of differences to Blogniscient, outside of the design and layout between the two sites. The first is that there are a much wider variety of topics to read about. Blogniscient offers four categories US Politics, Sci/Tech, Sports (just ‘Baseball’ right now), and Entertainment with promises for World, Business, and Health on the way.

Blogniscient offers three different views for each category, Top Blog Articles, Top Blogs, and Freshest Stuff (they are also experimenting with a cluster view and would like some feedback). Unlike Feedster and Technorati, who come out with blog rankings every few months or so, Blogniscient attempts to capture the top blogs in real time.

Finally, on the main Blogniscient page you’ll notice that they attempt to categorize posts - whether “Left” or “Right” under the Politics section or “Gossip” or “Music” under the Entertainment section. This gives the reader a little more perspective on the source of the information.

I’ve previously sat down for coffee with Blogniscient’s creator Ben Ruedlinger. He had a funny anecdote along the lines of - ‘I knew I was on to something with Blogniscient when my wife started to frequently use it for all her entertainment news.’ Look for me to post an interview with him in the coming weeks.

These are great tools, both for the technical community and for those outside of the blogosphere. Go check them out and see for yourself.

tagged under memeorandum, Blogniscient