Tailrank is a Memetracker?

I came across a new buzz word in the web/blog space today:Memetracker.

 

I was curious to find out what this is all about. So here are my findings.

 

First, what is a meme?  A "meme" is any "idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture".  The term "meme" was coined by Richard Dawkin's around 1976 to represent a cultural equivalent of a gene.

 

Therefore a meme tracker is an aggregator of ideas compiled by searching lots of blogs and prioritizing the most popular ones..

 

Tailrank is an example of a memetracker.   Tailrank, like memeorandum.com creates a so called "living" newspaper totally generated on the fly (every 5 minutes) with content from people's blogs.  Sounds a bit like what EPIC 2014 (a future history of the media by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson) was talking about.