ON "MAKING MEMEORANDUM EASIER TO READ" AND BROADER BLOGGING IMPLICATIONS

WHEAT FROM THE CHAFF

(UPDATE:  Podcast on StructuredBlogging by Marc Canter)

Regular readers know that I've been a fan of Memeorandum (especially the Tech one), the new blog filtering and presentation service for some time now.  As I noted in a recent post:

"Memeorandum in particular, I must say has most changed the way I consume tech news on the web, and has affected the topics I blog about."

I even suggested that this area may be fertile ground for the GYMAAAE companies to look for their next round of potential acquisitions and/or internal development.  On the flip side, I've highlighted some of the negative aspects of these services as well.

Memeorandum is a great service because it makes reading a bunch of blog posts on specific topics easty read at once, selected and updated AUTOMATICALLY from the vast universe of blogs. 

As Paul Kedrosky pithily reminds us in a post on the "StructuredBlogging" initiative from yesterday, PEOPLE ARE LAZY.  And Memeorandum is great for "lazy" geeks like me.

But this post is not just about the good stuff on Memeorandum, but about the limitations of Memeorandum's current User Interface. 

In recent days, it's been frustrating to read stories on the service, especially when there are a swarm of blog posts on a particular topic that then continue on for a couple of days or more.

Today's posts around the rumored news of Google buying Opera, the browser company, is a case in point.  It's a titillating story, especially for geeks, and is getting a lot posts by other bloggers, and I assume a fair number of readers vs. other topics on the service.

This topic itself has been floating up and down on memeorandum since yesterday.  My key beef is as follows:

When you refer to the service on and off through the day, it becomes difficult to quickly pick out the NEWER posts on the topic from the OLDER ones.

The lack of more "temporal visual cues" is the biggest issue I currently have with the user interface of the service.  There is no way to quickly tell which story came in when...no time stamps, nothing.  The only temporal indicator currently is in the "New Item Finder" on the top right, but it indicates only new posts in aggregate on the service.  They've started to give temporal cues on the main page BY TOPIC, but it doesn't seem to be that frequent.

At the very least, there should be a color-coded way to identify the older posts from newer posts.  The method can then be expanded to distinguish the posts that have the most user clicks from the ones that are not read that often.

There are dozens of ways to address this problem and people far more proficient in these issues than I can come up with solutions.

Technically I'm sure some, if not all of these things are hard to do, and I'm sure the founder, Gabe Rivera and his team have a fair number of things on their plate already as the service explodes in popularity.

As I explained in the earlier post, services like Memeorandum are at the forefront of the Web 2.0 companies in solving a pressing problem as web content worldwide, rapidly encompasses video and audio in massive amounts, in addition to it's growing text-based content:

"...What we need are dramatic improvements on how users NAVIGATE through informational and entertainment content.  We need a new form of CHANNEL SELECTOR for the entertainment content, and a CONVERSATION SELECTOR for the information content...

And the big portals like Yahoo! and Google are still at the stage of adding ways for their tens of millions of users to access RSS feeds.  Google's announcement yesterday of GMail Clips is a case in point, where they're still trying to figure out how best to design the USER INTERFACE for this constant flow of updated information.

A more important step forward, in my view, are the emerging class of what I'd call "NAVIGATION AND PRESENTATION" services I discussed in a previous post like Memeorandum, Digg, and others, that automatically crawl, index, and PRESENT content along themes and areas of interest.  These nascent services point to the next step TOWARDS the ultimate solution to this content DISCOVERY and PRESENTATION problem.

We're going to need the "Keep it as Simple as Possible for mainstream audiences" ethos of AOL a decade ago, if we're to see mass market adoption of these fancy, useful, but still very complicated to use and consume Web 2.0 technologies and services.

Memeorandum is the first company to crack an important part of the blog-reading problem of how to make conversations discernible from an exploding number of blog posts on individual blogs all over the fragmented web.  Other companies like Technorati, Blognisicient and others are following suit, building on this breakthrough approach.  And it's early days for everybody.

But as these services get mainstream exposure and usage, as my earlier post discussed, it's something that Memeorandum needs to have at the top of their to do list, if they don't already.

In the meantime, I'm going back to squinting at the headlines on Memeorandum again.

Comments

[Gabe]

Michael, thanks for the suggestion. It's come up before, but it's good to hear it again. It's definitely a power user feature (lots of people check only once a day), but I need to watch out for what the powers users want.

One correction: the New Item Finder actually identifies new posts, not new topics. It's a time sorted list of the latest posts (though abridged)!

Ok, now it's my turn: why is your blog page 2.6 megs?! Can't you drop some of the posts from months ago? It's so big, I've used it as a test cast for optimizing certain parts of memeorandum.

[Michael Parekh]

Thanks for the comment, Gabe, and the suggestions.

I've amended the post for the correction, and condensed the blog's main page hopefully.

You've probably lost an optimizing test tool.

Thanks again.

[David Sifry]

Michael,

Thanks for the kind words about Technorati's new Explore feature. We're constantly looking for new ways to help make sense of the blogosphere, and all of the expertise reflected in great blogs and bloggers.

We definitely look at Explore as just a first step in helping to reveal the most interesting conversations and context around topics in the blogosphere, and I'd love to hear more of your thoughts and advice on what you are looking for and how you would like to see it...

Dave