Getting your dose of daily news can be done in many different ways. Besides the old-fashioned way - visiting a couple of bookmarked sites - users have the choice of getting news through the wisdom of crowds, RSS aggregators, RSS mashups, linkblogs: the choices are unlimited. A news source that has lately risen in popularity is an automated news aggregator, or a memetracker - a website that gathers news from many sources (usually RSS feeds) and sorts it according to time of publishing, relevance, importance, number of inbound links or other factors. The important part here is there is very little or no interference by living editors; news items are chosen and sorted by an algorithm, automatically.

There’s an important difference between memetrackers and regular news aggregators. Popurls, for example, is a popular news aggregator, but it is not automated in the sense that it sorts the content for you - it merely aggregates news from a couple of sources. A memetracker may allow for some customization on your part, but the main idea behind such a service is that it tries to find the most relevant and fresh news and present it to you so that you don’t have to bother looking for it.

The sites featured in this roundup are Blogniscient, Buzzfeed, Chuquet, Daily Rotation, Feedable, Megite, Tailrank, Techmeme. For a few observations on the value and future of memetrackers in general, scroll down for the conclusion.

Blogniscient is a nicely designed site bringing you the top articles from several categories - US politics, Sci/Tech, Sports, Entertainment and Business. As far as options go, users can choose between seeing only the stories’ titles or titles with leads. Also, in subcategories the option “cluster view” groups similar stories together.

While the overall look of the site is nice, some of the space is wasted on the unnecessarily large header and two columns which could easily fit into one. This may not seem like much, but on a site like this every little bit of space for the actual news counts.

Blogniscient runs into a different sets of problems with the actual content. It seems to be indexing way too few blogs; for example, in the Sci/Tech category 80% of the stories come from Engadget and HD Beat. Furthermore, the stories are old. At the time of this writing, the first story in this subcategory is dated the 7th of March - 7 days old. The news stories are present under the “Freshest stuff tab”, but having articles that are more than one or two days old on the front page is still a bad idea for a news site. The overall impression is that Blogniscient isn’t bad, but the developers simply aren’t putting enough effort into it.

BuzzFeed is a bit different than the rest of this bunch. Like others, it aggregates news from many websites and sorts it according to some algorithm. However, unlike others, it adds its own editorial commentary, as the actual items often aren’t revolving around a specific story or an article. Instead, they are identified by a common buzz - a trend that is recently popular, written and talked about. The topics covered are movies, music, fashion, ideas, and technology.

BuzzFeed appears simple, but it has a couple of handy features. If you missed a story, it’s easy to find it in the handy calendar archive. Similarly to the “river of news” feature which appears on many memetrackers, on BuzzFeed there’s a list of “Recent Sites Making Buzz” in the column on the right.

Naturally, the visual approach is a little different too, as BuzzFeed doesn’t try to save space as much as others, trying to achieve a magazine look instead. The result is a site that’s great as a daily dose of fun, but not as good if you’re a journalist looking for new stories. This is not a bad thing: many memetrackers will put off many users with its all-too-professional look and feel, while BuzzFeed might become a favourite source for offbeat news for many.

Chuquet has an instantly identifiable problem: design. Its combination of yellow and grey background with black text is simply not a very good option for a website that needs to be very, very easy to read. The option to change the font size helps, but it doesn’t make the site any prettier. However, since little space is actually wasted in the design, this minimalist approach similar to the look of Reddit would probably work well after some color tweaking.

Chuquet delivers clusters of news, with one news item being on top and others presented as links. It covers technology, politics, business, science and entertainment. Users can choose between seeing 10, 20, 50 or 100 new items, and there’s an option to see popular or only latest items as well. As far as less orthodox features go, there are two: one lets you see the most referenced Wikipedia articles, while the other lets you browse the news through related Flickr images.

While it’s not bad at actually delivering the news (albeit at times a bit slow), Chuquet fails to really stand out as far as options and features go, and the lackluster design doesn’t help. A bit more effort and a redesign and it could be rubbing shoulders with the best services in this roundup.

Daily Rotation barely enters this contest, as it is for the most part a standard, customizable news aggregator. It gives you a choice of several hundred IT related news sources, and if that’s not enough, you can add more sources yourself. The RSS boxes are draggable, and the look and feel of the site is customizable to some extent, which makes Daily Rotation an IT-focused competitor to Netvibes, Pageflakes and other personalized portals.

However, Daily Rotation also offers the option to show a number (up to 50) of “top headlines”, which are chosen from a number of different feeds based (as Robert Helmer, the site’s founder, kindly explained to me) on what users are clicking on the most. So, while Daily Rotation is not a full-featured memetracker - if such a thing exists - but it gives the users a way to quickly scan the important news, which makes it more than just a run-of-the-mill news aggregator. Daily Rotation at this point doesn’t try to compete with other memetrackers, so don’t expect any advanced memetracking features from it.

Feedable

Like Daily Rotation, Feedable is an RSS reader with an added functionality of a memetracker. After signing up for the service, users can add their own news sources to the default feeds, organize them into folders, and do a bit of customization, for example change the background image.

As a memetracker, Feedable follows several topics: US Politics (why only US, I wonder), technology, blogosphere, gadgets, gaming, gossip, autos, science and fashion. However, its features are pretty basic: the stories aren’t clustered as in most other memetrackers; Feedable simply finds interesting items and sorts them by freshness and relevance. While this works well enough, clustering similar stories is a very important feature for a memetracker and Feedable is sorely lacking here. All in all, Feedable is a nice try to offer the best of both worlds, and it’s great if you take it for what it is; but if you expect some of the more advanced features that other memetrackers have, you might get disappointed.

Megite, together with TailRank and Techmeme can be considered the “big three” of memetracking. These products have separated themselves from the bunch by not leaving anything to chance. All of them bring in the news very fast, put a lot of effort in constant tweaking of their algorithms, and have been adding new features almost simultaneously, which in turns makes these three services quite similar.

Megite brings news from a variety of categories: technology, entertainment, science, politics, business, sports, and health. It also has a section for new videos, a trait it shares with Tailrank. You can also browse all the items that Megite has indexed chronologically in the “river of news”, or you can customize it by feeding it your custom-made OPML file. The actual news are shown in clusters, with the most relevant being on top.

As far as actual delivering of the news goes, Megite is right there on top. It picks up news quickly and intelligently puts the original sources on top and comments and opinions below. Occasional glitches are present; sometimes two unrelated stories will be shown as somehow connected, but examples of this are rare. I once warned Megite’s founder, Matthew Chen, about such an incident, which he promptly fixed, and I haven’t seen it happen again.

Tailrank

The story about Megite actually ends with Tailrank, because these two services are really similar, and there is very little on offer that can distinguish one from the other. Tailrank has less categories - technology, entertainment, politics and video, but it has more tools: it’s possible to submit a site to Tailrank, you can view news from a specific date (example: http://tailrank.com/2006-06-13), and Tailrank is also available in a version for mobile devices at the address m.tailrank.com.

When it comes to news aggregation, Tailrank clusters the articles revolving around one main story, but it doesn’t show as many stories as Techmeme or Megite right on the front page. To some, this will be a disadvantage, while others will appreciate less clutter and more clarity that this approach offers. It also gives Tailrank a very “neat” design, contrasted to sometimes chaotic look of the competitors. Tailrank also shows the top news items for today and yesterday in a handy box on the right side of the page.

Overall, Tailrank is the cream of the crop. Its smooth design, solid number of additional features and tools and timely deliverance of news will make it a favorite choice for many.

Techmeme is a site focused exclusively on computers and technology. Just like Megite and Tailrank, it finds and ranks news mainly based on links - when a news article is heavily linked by other sites, Techmeme will pick it up. The more attention an article gets, the higher it ranks on Techmeme. Furthermore, Techmeme intelligently finds the originators of the news and gives them more attention, while sites which have written about the same topic later are added below the original links as “related” or “discussion”. On the upper right side of the site there’s a “new item finder”, which shows the latest articles added to Techmeme. If you click on “extend timeline” the list of new items will expand, and on the bottom of the list you are presented by a new choice: “Techmeme river”, which leads you to a simple chronological “river of news”, similar to the “river” feature on Megite.

The design of the site can be described as spartan, with large blue fonts which contrast well against the white background. There is no eye candy to be seen here, but there is also very little visual information that can distract you from actually reading the content, which is great. As far as customization goes, Techmeme offers four different font sizes, two main views (a compact one and another one which shows discussion excerpts), the option to open links in another window and the possibility of searching the main blog search engines on the topic at hand.

Techmeme shares many positive and negative traits with Tailrank and Megite. On one hand, it does a wonderful job of extracting relevant news and sorting out the originators on top. It never overwhelms with too much news, and its high contrast design helps you notice the information quicker. On the downside, it will never pick up an article unless it’s been linked to a lot. It covers only IT news, however its sister sites, Memeorandum, WeSmirch and Ballbug (which are virtually identical as far as look and features go) are focused on politics, showbiz and baseball, respectively.

Conclusion

It is hard to compare memetrackers, and decide which one is best, because a big part of their value lies in the choice of news they provide, and it’s a very subjective category. Someone will prefer hardware news, while someone else might prefer Internet and gadgets.

However, when we put aside Daily Rotation and Buzzfeed, which are a bit different than others, it’s quite obvious that Techmeme, Tailrank and Megite are leading the pack. They have more features, index more sites, and bring the news faster than the rest. To catch up with the “big three”, the smaller players will have to do something extraordinary, or at least improve their service to scan for news more aggressively so they don’t fall behind.

This was further confirmed with a small informal test. While I was writing this article, a very important news item broke: Viacom’s lawsuit against Google. I was following the technology sections of all 8 memetrackers. Techmeme picked up the news first, soon to be followed by Megite and Tailrank. Daily Rotation and Feedable followed soon, while Chuquet was yet a bit more slower, and Blogniscient hasn’t picked up this news item even several hours after it broke out.

Since the best sites in this group are so similar, readers will choose them based on personal preferences - design and small details. I cannot say which one is the best. Something can be said for Techmeme’s focus on a narrower field - IT - which will probably make it a preferred source of news for those interested in that topic, but will also alienate everyone else. Tailrank and Megite, however, are neck to neck, and it will stay that way unless one of them comes up with something big.

What’s the real value of memetrackers?

Even the best of the sites described in this article are not without problems. Their biggest issue lies in their very core. Sometimes, great articles simply aren’t linked to all that much, especially when the article in question is not news but an analysis or a review. On the other hand, sites that get lots of links on every story they do, like TechCrunch, get featured even when the stories aren’t that interesting.

Furthermore, by clustering similar items together, they are in a sense forcing owners of smaller sites to link to articles on bigger sites. Paradoxically, even if a smaller site broke the news first, memetrackers will wait till the same news item appears on a bigger site (which obviously gets linked to often) and index that first, and the writers on the smaller sites will have to link to those articles if they want to get indexed.

In this light, all memetrackers might do well to consider adding alternative ways and algorithms for finding interesting news items. The number of inbound links is an important metric, but it is not almighty. Until they come up with something new, they will all suffer from the same shortcomings. As it is now, memetrackers are fantastic - when combined with other news sources.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 at 10:23 am and is filed under Reviews, Web, Web 2.0, Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.