Counting the Birds

Steve posted the first report earlier tonight about his Memetracker exercise.

I participated in the exercise, and I noticed one interesting thing that I want to share.

First, the other participants that I could find:

(1) michael parekh on IT
(2) Life Is A Carnival And So Is The Blogosphere
(3) The Business Blogger | Leveraged Promotion
(4) Battle of the Memetrackers, or Breememe!
(5) Another attempt at tracking…Breememe.
(6) Breeereport, Breeememe and Bruuuhaha…
(7) Tech: Breememe – Battle of the Memetrackers
(8) Blog Design & Differing Value Of Visitors
(9) Breememe: Resistance Is Futile!

Now the Results

Tailrank: 5 links (Steve’s original post, mine, 6, 7 and 4).

Megite: Picked up Steve’s original post and mine as discussion links to other topics.

Chuquet: I didn’t find any links.

Memeorandum: 4 links (Steve’s original post, 1, 2 and (here’s where it gets interesting) my post last night (before Steve even started the memetracker exercise) about Tailrank).

Somehow the Memeorandum algorithm filtered out my post today which was less substantive with respect to the topic of Steve’s post (memetrackers) and grabbed my earlier post which was much more substantive to the topic, even though my less substantive post linked to Steve’s post while my more substantive one did not.

Now one explanation is that this is just a happy accident. But another explanation is that the algorithm figured out that Steve’s topic was about memetrackers, found both of my posts about memetrackers (one very substantive and one primarily just a link to Steve’s post) and made the correct decision to grab the more substantive post.

If that’s the case then Gabe has some serious magic working over at Memeorandum.

Gabe left the following comment to both Steve’s original post and mine:

[G]lad you like the site. I should point out though that memeorandum almost does the opposite of what you want, by design. The software deliberately omits links to posts (“memes”?) that it discovers, in order to improve readability. The idea is that not every post that links to X deserves to be read as commentary on X.

So in that regard, you seem to want a different kind of service, one that definitely has its value, but not one I aim to offer right now.

That certainly sounds like the selection between my available posts was by design.

Today was a neat exercise that gave me a little more data I can use in my continuing efforts to find a pattern in the links and link management activities of my favorite memetrackers.