Meme Tracker

Another handy tool in organizing the latest and greatest - a "Meme" tracker integrates latest headlines on a given topic from a variety of sources. "Memes" is a term coined by Richard Dawkins in the 70ties to describe a unit of cultural information. In the context of technews, internet buzz etc. it describes the latest events, hypes etc. in the industry. Check out http://techmeme.com/ as an example. WAP review has reviewed the mobile version. If I understand correctly the difference to a RSS-feed reader is that the selection of the relevant sources is not done by the user, but the owner of the memetracker. I am curious to see whether I find relevant news that I cannot find by following a number of relevant sites and blogs from the area I am interested in, that have updates on a daily basis.

I wonder, if a memetracker will indeed surface topics that between the sources I have used so far I might miss. Or, alternatively, if a memetracker can serve as the first information stop, and other sources will become less important. Finally, intuitely I am asking myself: so how can I customize this service and add sources I like? But that does not seem to be the point, if I get the concept - if I want to define the sources, I use an RSS-reader. Memetracker I guess would be more like traditional media, ie. trusted gatekeepers that channel signal from noise for the recipient, only that the actual aggregation happens in an automated way.

But the all decisive question for me really is: how to find enough attention span and cognitive processing capacities to absorb all of this readily available constant information chatter ... sigh.