Memeorandum Gets a Well-Deserved Compliment from The Guardian

by Damozel | At  The Guardian, Jack Schofield writes glowingly of our one and only news aggregator:

If you want to know what’s happening in the world, then Memorandum will tell you – at least in a couple of areas. It’s an automated news clipping service, known in the trade as a “news aggregator”. It provides headlines and short texts updated every few minutes, with links to the original sites, much like Google News.

Memeorandum is based on the idea of “memes” or ideas that spread across the web (along with a pun on memorandum). Someone publishes an interesting story, other people find it, discuss it, and link to it. That’s how the web works. Small stories come and go quickly, while big ones generate lots of comment and dominate the page for hours.

Here is why we prefer it to any other:

Google also follows links and assesses content, but Memeorandum is embarrassingly better than Google News. Google reckons that the more coverage a story gets, the more important it is. Unfortunately, broad coverage takes a long time to develop, so Google News can run hours or even a day behind Memeorandum. This is fine for casual consumers, but if you're a news junkie – or a journalist – it's hopeless.

Also if you're a poli-blogger.  It's certainly the first place we look to stay on top of what's happening and [even better] what other bloggers we like are saying about it.

Schofield has a couple of criticisms.

There are, however, two major problems with Memeorandum: it doesn't cover many topics, and it doesn't cover much of the world....

[T]he sites mainly cover the US....[I]f you're interested in news from Europe or Japan, for example, it's the wrong place to go....

Another complaint is that the Memeorandum sites now give far too much coverage to mainstream sources such as the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, the BBC and the Guardian....

[T]he biggest mystery of all is why a rich global corporation has not made Gabe an offer he can't refuse and globalised his system. He's had offers, but he values his freedom and says: "I don't want to be accountable to organisations that appear clueless about the future of news."

At TMV, Joe Gandelman has a Take a Peek piece on memeorandum.  We couldn't agree more.

We’ve been in touch with Rivera by email over the years, and that quote confirms our impression of him as a free and visionary thinker who has revolutionized the news menu on the Internet and worked to fine tune his sites menu and delivery system.

Take A Peek at memeorandum and all of Rivera’s other aggregaters and we’re SURE you’ll take a daily hourly peek….at them all. P.S.: The Guardian recognition shows that good things do happen to creative, innovative people, who can have a big impact…as memeorandum most assuredly has. And will.

One of his commenters says, and rightly: 

"There are not too many things about which the word "indispensable" can justifiably be used. Memeorandum is one of the few."

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