Memeorandum and the culture of shared text

UPDATE: fixed an essential typo and broken link. Memeorandum with a "u".

One of the things that people get when they are in a world where they read the same newspaper is a culture of shared text - you read it, I read it, we can both talk about it without having to go into a lot of backstory.

Cities where a national or global newspaper of record (and I'm thinking the Wall Street Journal right now) has widespread use and readership in a niche means that every day everyone there has at least some conversation starter on page one.

The blog world for all of its benefits does not generally have shared text as a starting point. We are all going our own separate ways, and there is a lot more to say and a lot more ways to say it than if it were in a single editorialized narrow channel. A few blogs - Gizmodo maybe - have enough focused and edited readership to do that, but it's not anything at all like the world where I grew up where a lot of people in Marquette County read the Marquette Mining Journal and there really wasn't an alternative text to reference for what was going on.

Perhaps this is changing for the world of people who watch the technology press closely. A site called Memeorandum aggregates tech stories in real time and presents a unified front page laid out nicely with stories and commentary in pleasant link format. There are no ways for you as a reader to customize the page, but if you are an A-list blogger and make a posting that's properly relevant and linked it automatically (somehow) gets attached to the main story. I know that some Silicon Valley journalists are hitting this site all during their working days.

Technorati Tags: aggregator, memeorandom, memeorandum

Comments

[Mark Smith]

Some people would undoubtedly argue that the lack of shared text is an important feature of the blog world. It certainly does make the conversation less focused; whether that is good or bad depends on your point of view. Memeorandum looks interesting (that's http://tech.memeorandum.com/ with a 'u' in random by the way).

[Peter Fleck]

The memeorandum folk have added widgets for blogs and this, it would seem to me, can help in sharing the news.

http://blog.memeorandum.com/051021/widgets

And some stories seem to reverberate across the blogosphere and sure feel like a shared text to me: Judith Miller and the NY Times, Katrina, the Flock browser, good Google/bad Google, etc.