3 ring circus

You will notice a new manifestation of Server on your left: the tech memeorandum, which I ran across from a Wired article about it and its political sister site. These resources, plus Google Reader, have somewhat overwhelmed me with information, and I haven't devoted any serious time lately to publishing my own material here. Give me another couple of days, though, to try and climb this mountain and see what I can see.

edit: Perhaps I should say a bit more. From the above linked Wired article:

Others have criticized the service as being insular, since the algorithms start looking for stories by relying on a select group of A-list technology and policy bloggers.

But Rivera says that outside sources can quickly become the top item, as demonstrated when a press release from the American Association of Publishers announcing a lawsuit against Google Print instantly became the No. 1 story on Memeorandum.

Memeorandum isn't the only site trying to make sense of the real-time web. Others like digg, reddit, del.icio.us, newsmap and Blogniscient have similar goals, but many of these rely heavily on users voting on or submitting stories.

Memeorandum also has a fan in Nathan Torkington, an O'Reilly Media editor.

"Memeorandum is as much about aggregating reader intelligence as it is about aggregating articles," Torkington said in an e-mail. "It's a great step toward a tool that can turn a flood of grapes into a trickle of fine wine. Google News aggregates the editorial judgment from newspapers, but Memeorandum treats blogs and newspapers equally, which means it's tapped into the collective zeitgeist of the net."

Again, we have a scenario in which machine (algorithmic) evaluation is pit against human evaluation, and the machine ends up being more accurate, comprehensive, and sensitive to what we want from that sort of service.