Still behind on giving props to folks I know, who, despite all the Web 2.0 hype and Bubble 2.0 anti-hype, are busy doing what matters; inventing a better future for all of us, in both small and grand ways.
Memeorandum, or more specifically, Tech.Memeorandum, brain child of Gabe Rivera is first up. Simply put, Memeorandum is Google News for blogs. With 2.0 (which Gabe was kind enough to let me test, despite providing him with nearly no useful feedback), Gabe made a number of significant improvements, including the automatic discovery of posts NOT from sites in his seed list. Put another way, Gabe’s developed an algorithm that can instantly surface whatever’s hot, whether or not he knew the source before its, uh, hotness developed. Very cool.
I snuck into the WordPress.com (i.e., the ASP version of the very, very popular hosted blog software available from WordPress.org) beta (yet another smart project by Matthew Mullenweg) way back on August 17th (yes, I’m two months behind…). I haven’t spent as much time with WordPress.com, despite a slick interface and great feature set, for only one reason: right now, you can only host on a subdomain of wordpress (i.e., somedomain.wordpress.com). I will switch to WordPress.com the minute (plus or minus two months, lol) Matt enables remote FTP publishing to my own domain (and provides a clear set of instructions on how to move all my Blogger posts over w/o breaking shit). How ’bout it Matt??
Conceptually sitting somewhere between the above two offerings is a new intelligence offering by TechDirt front man Mike Masnick: TechDirt InfoAdvisor aimed at corporate environments. Think of it as a personalized, analyst vetted (and equally importantly, culled) stream of market and competitive intelligence delivered in blog format. Good stuff!
Finally, PR maven Renee Blodgett is excited about KnowNow, an emerging player in the enterprise RSS space. I haven’t spent time with the service yet, but I do know that uber braniac Adam Rifkin was involved with its development, so it’s probably worth a closer look.