Richard MacManus of Read/Write Web reports that two people who ought to know (Gabe Rivera and Nic Cubrilovic) think that “personal meme trackers” aren’t possible with current technology.
To me, it’s irrelevant whether they’re technologically feasible or not. Call me nutty, but I don’t want a page of news personalized only for me. I can just imagine the melange it might come up with: cheesy Buddhist ideas mixed with stories of fat babies and OPML hacks, all garnished with semantic web ideas and a sprinkling of feminism. Blech.
What I would like is a small set of Memeorandum-like news pages to read each morning that highlight conversations rippling across the domains and blogging communities of interest to me. Unfortunately, there isn’t a conversation tracker like Memeorandum for all the domains I follow, most notably what I call reflective motherhood (i.e., women and men reflecting on parenting and its social context as opposed to simple personal journals with entries like “Timmy vomited today”) and the issue of women in technology. Important conversations regularly sweep through blogs in these two areas, but I have to manually find them because there’s no mom.memeorandum or womangeek.memeorandum. It kills me that more meme trackers keep popping up following the same topic areas. I can get my tech and politics fix almost anywhere. Where can I find a daily listing of conversations around motherhood? Blogs tackling that subject link sparsely to one another, but it doesn’t mean that important ideas, memes that is, aren’t being shared and massaged and passed along.
A commenter on Nic’s post outlining the problems with implementing personalized memetracking notes that memes are primarily social and shared, not unique to the individual. So if something is completely personalized, it’s not a meme tracker. Memes are little bits of human creation that get themselves reproduced, because they are so pleasing or so annoying or otherwise so irresistible that we can’t help but pass them along. Incidentally, the four things meme is not a meme in the original sense of the word, because humans explicitly expect for it to be copied.
Instead of offering the ultimately individualized feed reading experience, developers should provide RSS aggregators and filters targeted at well-defined communities of readers. It’s only natural that techies would build for other techies, but I see better opportunities in building for communities that are, as yet, unserved.
POSTSCRIPT: I address why I haven’t built a community meme tracker myself in a later post.
