This is some pretty promising stuff — the new incarnation of Memeorandum is an automated tech and politics blog news aggregator that hopes to keep an up-to-the-minute snapshot of what's hot in the blogosphere. The new code has only been public for a few days, so the sample size is still low — but from what I've checked out so far, I'm genuinely impressed. The biggest caveat is that it's only tracking technology and politics — but within those domains it stands to be an incredibly useful tool for quickly getting a feel for what's going on in those spaces, right at that moment. Essentially, stories that get linked most frequently rise to the top, then sink down again as they're replaced by newer, hotter stories. The algorithm favors posts with some meat on their bones, and disfavors blog posts that are quick one-liners linking to something else.

What's particularly interesting to me are the way conversations are prioritized in the interface. For each story, you also get information on who else is talking about that meme. You can set preferences to show the related discussion links by default, or toggle the view manually when you want to see them. This is excellent because it gives you a concise overview of who else is talking about the same thing — and because each conversation entry is listed with the blog author and blog title as well as the post title, you really get some idea of who is doing the talking. It's not quite a conversation cloud in visual representation, but it is a step towards grokking something about the higher order picture of the blogosphere — who is talking to whom, about what. Creator of the site Gabe Rivera has some words on why Memeorandum exists on his blog, including this bit about the conversation emphasis: "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." I'm hoping this is just one of an eventual plethora of tools that starts to address this problem of valuing conversation on the web.

[Via Read/Write Web]