My blogging friend Adam Green of Darwinian Web and I share a mutual fascination with the way in which the “A-list” of blogosphere opinion setters operates, and in particular how the “meme-trackers” such as tech.memeorandum.com help to perpetuate the A-list. Adam has written an insightful post about this, and about how much of the clustering that occurs on memeorandum (for the record, I like the redesign too, Gabe) occurs as a result of what he calls “Scobling,” in which A-listers like The Scobelizer single out and link to other A-listers, or M-listers link to A-listers like Scoble to get some “link juice.”
Interestingly enough, of course, Adam linked to Scoble’s post about the redesign of memeorandum.com, and that link in turn helped get him onto memeorandum as a sub-link to Scoble’s post. In a convoluted sort of way, Adam’s own discussion of this kind of thing is itself an example of what is being discussed (does that make your head hurt? It does mine). Adam and I have also talked before via email about how memeorandum.com is effectively a “black box,” in the sense that the precise way in which it ranks some posts higher than others, or shuffles threads around and ranks different posts within those threads, is understood only by Gabe himself. He has let the odd hint out, but very little detail.
Adam has even boldly suggested the idea of an “advisory board” that could help develop the memetracker idea, although I think he’s backed off a bit on that, perhaps in part because of the controversy surrounding our old friend Dave Winer and the RSS Advisory Board, which Dave has unilaterally decided to disband, all the while claiming that he isn’t the “Lord God of RSS” and just wants to help. So what can we M-listers do to fight the power of the A-list and the memetrackers? Link to each other. And get on board Kent Newsome’s “second opinion” wagon train.
