An interview with Memeorandum's founder

Tech.memeorandum.com is a must-read Web site for tech journalists, Net stock analysts, Web company managers, and geeks who want to be in the know.  It is a constantly changing buffet of news headlines from bloggers and pontificators.

Think of it as a real-time  trade publication says its founder, Gabe Rivera.  He quit his day job as a programmer at Intel Corp. because "I imagined this, and I recognized it would require a lot of time and experimentation to build."  He works almost continuously, staying with a friend in Silicon Valley.  He is his only employee.   "The work I need to do is so involved, so hairy, that communicating with other people to make it work would be a big distraction."

Rivera began with two sites.  The other, also launched last September, is Memerandum.com. Its focus is politics.     There is http://www.memeorandum.com/ for politics.  Together they have 10-20,000 daily visitors. 

Many of the headlines that show up on the sites would be unrecognizable to general news consumers.  "Each of these readers are insiders, they are passionate, like the people writing are passionate. It's bloggers writing for their own audience," he said in an interview. Listen to it here.

Because of their sophistication, Rivera thinks sponsors should find them attractive.  "I haven't gotten around to that yet.  It's not my top priority. Maybe it should be," he said.

Rivera's constantly searching Web spiders are now pushing links and content to two other sites, publishing in the same links-a-lot format. Rivera has applied Memorandum's technology to http://www.ballbug.com/ for Major League Baseball and WeSmirch, an "automatic dirt digger."

More Meme- Web sites are in the works, Rivera said.  But not soon.  "They take work," he explained.  "And also they need to have communities of bloggers who talk to each other."