Dan points to the new Tech section over at Memeorandum - worth RSSing. Richard has a good review:
I've been one of the beta testers of a brilliant new blog news service over the past 2-3 months - and today it's gone live. tech.memeorandum is the brainchild of Gabe Rivera. It basically aggregates all the latest news from blogs on one page - but it's more than that. It's an automated, constantly-updated, finger on the pulse of the tech blogosphere.
How it works: the more people that link to a blog post, the bigger the headline. The biggest and most recent headlines are at the top of the page, but move down as newer popular stories emerge to take their place. Below the original source of each story are links to other bloggers who have linked to it. But the beauty of it is, only posts with a decent amount of writing in them make the memeorandum page. A simple link and a sentence won't do.
All in all, it's like a hybrid of populicio.us and the New York Times!
This is a great example of the Web 2.0 that communicators are going to have to deal with going forward. Gabe has a terrific explanation of this:
What are my goals for this site? I want it to address some unfulfilled needs in online news. They are:
- Recognize the web as editor: There's this notion that blogs collectively function as news editor. No, not every last blog on Earth. Tapping the thoughts of all of humanity uniformly would predictably lead to trivial, even spammy "news". But today there are rather large communities of knowledgeable, sophisticated commentators, (and yes) even reporters writing on the web, signaling in real time what's worthy of wider discussion. I want memeorandum to tap this signal.
- Rapidly uncover new sources: Sometimes breaking news is posted to a blog created just to relate that news. Sometimes the author of the most insightful analysis piece at 2PM was a relative unknown at 1PM. It happens. I want memeorandum to highlight such work, without delay.
- Relate the conversation: Communication on the web naturally tends toward conversation. It follows from human nature plus the Internet's immediacy. Blog posts react to news articles, essays reference editorials. And links abound. Yet most news sites do very little to relate the form of conversations unfolding in real time. Some seem to deny that a conversation is even occurring. I want memeorandum to be a clear exception.