One of the things I mentioned in my “items that might grow up to be blog posts” post from last night was an entry by Phil Sim of Squash about how the tech blogosphere has “peaked.” Phil, who is a bit of a curmudgeon at times – not that there’s anything wrong with that – says he’s noticed that tech.memeorandum.com is boring now, everyone is writing about the same old crap, the site’s Alexa traffic is down, and so on. The capper for Phil is that Gabe has branched out into baseball with a sports-themed version of memeo.

Gabe and Paul Montgomery of Tinfinger.com raise a number of points in the comments to Phil’s post, including the fact that Alexa’s rankings aren’t the best guide when it comes to traffic, and also that more “memetrackers” have entered the field, including Megite.com and TailRank.com. But Phil’s point seems to be larger than just that. As my friend Rob Hyndman says here, Phil seems more concerned about the idea that this slump might be part of a cyclical decline in the blogosphere, with many bloggers coming up to their two-year anniversary (in fact, plenty of them are coming up to their fourth, but who’s counting).

Phil says he found in journalism that two years was the longest you could write about something without getting bored and stale. I’d like to run that idea by someone like Walt Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal, who’s been writing about tech for substantially longer than that and still seems pretty interested, but let’s leave that for a moment. I’ve also been writing about technology and business off and on for more than a decade now, and I don’t find it any more boring, or have any less interest in it – if anything, I find I have more interest now as a result of things like Web 2.o.

Apart from the Alexa data problem, I think Phil is confusing a normal human phenomenon with a cyclical downturn in the tech blogosphere. It’s possible that some bloggers who have been doing it for years may be feeling burnt out, and others may feel that it’s time to move on to other things – and others may be working on their own Web 2.0 projects, the way Rob and Mark and I have been working on mesh (as I pointed out to my friend Kent Newsome when he wondered whether I was losing interest in blogging).

Blogging is writing, and it’s a conversation too – and both of those things have a natural ebb and flow to them. Writing is hard (at least good writing is) and some days are better than others. And some conversations are better than others. Phil himself has wondered in the past whether it isn’t too much for one person to do consistently. I told him then that I thought maybe he was getting too caught up in the traffic thing and needed to refocus. Why are we blogging? That’s the most important thing. If it’s for traffic or attention, then that will inevitably wane – if it is from passion or desire for conversation, then I think that can endure a lot longer. Everyone has to choose.

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.

There’s no question that Gabe of Memeorandum.com has created a tremendous resource (there’s an interview with him at Don Dodge’s blog) but I must admit it baffles me sometimes. I considered not writing this post at all because it will probably sound like I’m just whining about not being on the top of tech.memeorandum.com with the A-listers, but I’ve followed the site for quite a while now, and the reason some posts rise or fall in the ranking of topics — and some stay longer while others disappear — eludes me. And it kind of bugs me a little bit. And no, I’m not writing this post just to try and get to the top by mentioning Gabe :-)

I know that the algorithm behind the site is top secret, so there’s not much point in asking about it. But today is a good example of how mysterious the system is — I’ve been on memeorandum.com many times, either linked to other posts or sometimes as a major topic. I was even at the top of the site briefly one day (although it was a weekend, so that might have increased my chances). But today I wrote a post about IE7, commenting on some of the criticisms and joining in the conversation, but that post never appeared anywhere on tech.memeorandum.com — nor did one that I wrote the day before about network neutrality.

Neither one appeared despite the fact that I wrote them around the same time as several other people whose posts were linked to or formed major memeorandum.com topic headings, including Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 and my friends Mark Evans and Rob Hyndman. Is there something I’m doing wrong, Gabe? WordPress pings technorati automatically, and a bunch of other sites. Is it that I’m linking too much to different people, or not linking enough? I have to know. Not that I care about that kind of thing, of course. It’s just bugging me. (Dave Taylor doesn’t like memeorandum because he says it adds “an amplifier to the echo chamber” of the blogosphere).

Update:

This post is now near the top of the section about Gabe, and showed up only a few minutes after I posted it, which actually makes me more confused instead of less.

Update 2:

Gabe emailed me and said that both of the posts I mentioned had actually been linked to on the site at different times, and sent me links to cached versions of the pages. I guess I must have missed when they were on the site and then they fell off the radar quickly and so I never saw them. The strange thing is, some posts (like the one above) show up right away, and the ones Gabe checked on didn’t show up for hours. Maybe I’m trying too hard to figure this whole thing out — I should probably just go read a book, or alphabetize my CDs or something useful :-)

Anyone who spends any time with blogs and the Web winds up with hundreds of RSS feeds and sites they want to check — and yet there are always more, not to mention regular news sites. How best to filter all that? Sure, we could all just go to tech.memeorandum.com and leave it at that, but if you’re like me you just wind up subscribing to even more feeds and it compounds the problem.

Readers like Bloglines.com, NetNewsWire and NewsGator.com help, but even they can’t do it all. My colleague Mark Evans mentions Inform.com, which had a rather ignominious launch awhile back but seems to have ironed most of the bugs out. I like the ability to sort through news based on themes (they call it a “discovery path”), and to track those through other sources, but the interface seems a little on the complicated side, and I wonder if that will hold it back.

I’ve come across a couple of other attempts at solving the problem, and both are kind of interesting: Gritwire.com uses a desktop-style Flash interface and has some nice elements to it (although I’ve just started playing around with it — I think I came across it in Steve Rubel’s links one day) and Common Times goes at it a different way: it looks like a newspaper, but the articles are arranged based on a kind of del.icio.us-style social bookmarking process. It makes good use of Ajax and tags too. If you’ve tried either one, or know of any others along the same lines, drop me a note.