How About Total Thermomemetracker War?

Posted on February 21, 2006

Want to play a game? Robert Scoble started testing the blog search tools with his brrreeeport game last week and now Steve Rubel has a new nonsense word test called breememe to test the memetrackers. Memetrackers are tools for tracking popular blog conversations. The most popular one is Tech.memeorandum. Mashable has a review of several memtrackers here including Megite, Choquet, Blogniscient and Tech.memeorandum. TailRank is a another memetracker that recently debuted.

The most important issue isn't whether the memetrackers pick up some conversations about a nonsense word started by an a-list blogger but about how many people actually read and use the memetrackers themselves. Many people don't and won't use memetrackers as you can see in the comments of this post by Scoble. Tech.memeorandum.com has also been labeled as the "Testosterone Meme" by BurningBird for being too focused on posts from male bloggers. Others have accused the memetrackers of being too focused on the a-list blogs.

However, we have actually learned a few things from these nonsense word tests so far. First, Steve Rubel's nonsense word "breememe" is easier to type than Scoble's "brrreeeport." A few bloggers used brreeeport, breeeport and even breeeeport (sometimes intentionally) instead of the "proper" brrreeeport. That's ok though because it isn't a real word anyway. Finally, Steve Rubel says TailRank is beating Tech.memeorandum so far but Technorati still shows many more results for breememe than the TailRank memetracker.