Memeorandum and other news aggregators are focused on what’s going on NOW which isn’t really always super interesting. However, geek bloggers know that news aggregators are a great way to build traffic to their own blogs. A simple trackback post to the news item will likely result in publicity for the blog in the form of a link in the discussion for that news item on the aggregator’s site. Keen to this, many bloggers are quick to post such follow-ups. Sometimes the blogger adds some great insight to the news item in which case their presence in the discussion is certainly merited, but often it’s the case that the follow-up post is light on value to the reader and thus adds little to the discussion.

Gabe, if you’re somehow reading this, my suggestion would be to track out-going clicks such that if there is a link to a post in a discussion where many users are clicking and then within a few seconds clicking browser-back and returning to Memeorandum, then treat that as a negative importance vote for that link (post). If the post has a high-frequency of users that do click thru and quickly return to Memeorandum and also if the post has 0 comments, just go ahead and boot it from the discussion links for the news item. Hopefully that would encourage bloggers to only post follow-ups if they truly have something meaningful to add. Furthermore, it would help keep a high signal/noise ratio for Memeorandum readers.

In my own experience, I have noticed that the most insightful and mind-tingling posts are those where the author/blogger has clearly spent some time composing their thoughts and not just trying to garner some quick attention. For some good reads, I suggest you check out some of the blogs listed over on the right column under “Some Feeds I Read”. Happy reading!