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"Memediggers" by Pete Cashmore - Mashable Blog
This is from Pete Cashmore's MASHABLE blog on Memediggers:
It seems that Digg has inspired a whole new genre of people-powered sites, but as Kevin Kelly points out, we don’t have a name for them yet. For now, I’ll call them memediggers.
So here’s the thing: I’ve noticed a few people using the word memetracker to describe Digg, Reddit and similar sites.
But as far as I’m concerned, these aren’t really memetrackers. To clarify: a
memetracker is a service that finds the most talked-about news and ideas by
analysing the linking behaviour of blogs. It’s based on implicit actions. A
memedigger, meanwhile, uses explicit human-powered voting
systems to deliver the most popular, relevant or interesting items. Since
they require human action, these sites normally have a verb associated with
them: Digg It, Shout It and so on. Social bookmarking sites are also
memediggers to some extent, where bookmarking a site counts as a vote (del.icio.us/popular,
for example). But enough with the buzzwords - let’s try to get a handle on
what’s happening in this space…
...
His final comments are so insightful:
I’m actually pretty hesitant to label these things at all: having a name for something can define it in your mind and prevent you from thinking outside the box. Yes, there’s an opportunity to build memetrackers and memediggers for niche markets, but there’s also the chance to move beyond the Digg-like sites and look at new ways to apply social software. FeedButler and Listible (”Digg for feeds” and “Digg for lists,” respectively) are making minor tweaks to the memedigger concept, but the most exciting players are breaking new ground. Wink, Jookster and Filangy, for instance, are embracing social search - building voting and tagging on top of algorithmic search engines.
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I am thankful for Pete's research and insights. He's put a lot of effort into his post on this topic. I recommend you read the entire article and catch his blog for other insights.
My personal interest here is how "memediggers" are evolving and being
applied to niche markets - in particular B2B businesses in enterprise scale
organizations. I'm glad to have found this and very thankful for his
creativity in this area of technology. It's interesting to see this new
movment. I'm attending SXSW 2006, and these ideas and concepts around social
software are being covered in many of the sessions. What an exciting time to
be involved with the Internet as we build systems that involve people in a
more natural way.
Tom
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