Memetrack This Blog
I wrote a post about "discovery pages" last december.
I talked about delicious popular, digg, reddit, and memeorandum.
Since then, I have become a fan of another discovery page, called Tail Rank.
I met with Kevin Burton, who built Tail Rank, at eTech and he laid out an interesting way of thinking about all of these services. He said that digg and reddit are basically slashdot style community driven discovery engines. Delicious’ popular page is also a community generated discovery engine, but it uses a different approach than digg and reddit.
Kevin described Tail Rank and Memeorandum as "memetrackers" and the essential difference is that they are designed to follow a meme and the links to it that develop over time. They work as discovery pages as well but they serve a slightly different purpose.
I like Kevin’s description of a memetracker and I am using both memeorandum and Tail Rank about evenly now. I think both services are great.
I suggested an idea to Kevin last week and it is already implemented (that’s impressive). It’s called "memetrack this blog" and it allows a blogger or anyone who publishes to the web to enter the URL of their domain and see all the "memes" they’ve started and track them.
Here is the memetrack for this blog.
I’ve added a link to the stats section on the lower left sidebar so that anyone can memetrack this blog anytime they want.
I think this will be a very useful tool for bloggers to track how their posts develop and get linked to and its one more reason to use Tail Rank which is developing into a really useful service.