There’s a lot of buzz about memeorandum and tech.memeorandum these days, both because of Don Dodge’s interview with its founder, Gabe Rivera, but also because ranked aggregation is kind of a holy grail in Web 2.0 right now – everyone is trying to figure out how to replace the human editor and make aggregation of quality content scalable.
But I have my doubts that this will amount to a real business, and suspect that for while it will be at most an interesting experiment. I’m not saying someone won’t make money – someone almost certainly will – but it will be “wing and a prayer”, “buy it quick and then figure out what to do with it” money. And that’s simply because the barriers to entry in this space are now infintesimally small, for all of the reasons we’ve been hearing about for a while. Already there are several other similar sites that are swiftly moving into this space with memeo in their sights (see a roundup here). My guess is that soon the memeobuzz will be over and the next great thing will be out, will be played with for a while, and then will also recede into distant memory.
Sooner or later, someone has got to figure out how to make a durable business out of this.
Update: Stowe Boyd writes that Conversational Index, where CI=posts/comments+trackbacks, is a useful index of a viable and vibrant blog, and others pick up that discussion. No doubt it’s a useful way to look at it, but some of the most banal discussion out there generates loads of “right on, dude” commentary that can leave you scrolling through minutes of emptiness. And as more people blog, I’m inclined to think that blogging will become even more of a multi-blog conversation – everyone blogging the issue themselves (trackback or not), rather than leaving comments on other blogs.