{"id":194,"date":"2006-02-03T20:40:18","date_gmt":"2006-02-04T01:40:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/index.php\/2006\/02\/03\/memeorandum-is-a-black-box\/"},"modified":"2006-02-03T20:40:18","modified_gmt":"2006-02-04T01:40:18","slug":"memeorandum-is-a-black-box","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2006\/02\/03\/memeorandum-is-a-black-box\/","title":{"rendered":"Memeorandum is a black box"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s no question that Gabe of Memeorandum.com has created a tremendous resource (there&#8217;s an interview with him <a href=\"http:\/\/dondodge.typepad.com\/the_next_big_thing\/2006\/02\/interview_with_.html\">at Don Dodge&#8217;s blog<\/a>) but I must admit it baffles me sometimes. I considered not writing this post at all because it will probably sound like I&#8217;m just whining about not being on the top of tech.memeorandum.com with the A-listers, but I&#8217;ve followed the site for quite a while now, and the reason some posts rise or fall in the ranking of topics &#8212; and some stay longer while others disappear &#8212; eludes me. And it kind of bugs me a little bit. And no, I&#8217;m not writing this post just to try and get to the top by mentioning Gabe  \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p>I know that the algorithm behind the site is top secret, so there&#8217;s not much point in asking about it. But today is a good example of how mysterious the system is &#8212; I&#8217;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 href=\"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/index.php\/2006\/02\/03\/hey-bloggers-msft-doesnt-care-about-you\/\">a post about IE7<\/a>, commenting on some of the criticisms and joining in the conversation, but that post never appeared anywhere on tech.memeorandum.com &#8212; nor did one that I wrote the day before <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/index.php\/2006\/02\/02\/telecoms-and-the-toll-road-gambit\/\">about network neutrality<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>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 <a href=\"http:\/\/publishing2.com\">Publishing 2.0<\/a> and my friends <a href=\"http:\/\/evans.blogware.com\">Mark Evans<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.robhyndman.com\">Rob Hyndman<\/a>. Is there something I&#8217;m doing wrong, Gabe? WordPress pings technorati automatically, and a bunch of other sites. Is it that I&#8217;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&#8217;s just bugging me. (Dave Taylor <a href=\"http:\/\/www.intuitive.com\/blog\/why_i_really_dont_like_memeorandum.html\">doesn&#8217;t like memeorandum<\/a> because he says it adds &#8220;an amplifier to the echo chamber&#8221; of the blogosphere).<\/p>\n<p><b>Update:<\/b><\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p><b>Update 2:<\/b><\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;t show up for hours. Maybe I&#8217;m trying too hard to figure this whole thing out &#8212; I should probably just go read a book, or alphabetize my CDs or something useful   \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<div class=\"syndication-links\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s no question that Gabe of Memeorandum.com has created a tremendous resource (there&#8217;s an interview with him at Don Dodge&#8217;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&#8217;m just whining about not being on the top of tech.memeorandum.com with &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2006\/02\/03\/memeorandum-is-a-black-box\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Memeorandum is a black box&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=194"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}