Meme trackers are something that I have a huge amount of interest in so when I read about a new one called Blogcosm (courtesy of Mathew Ingram) I ran over to check it out.  I actually thought Mr. Ingram was being too hard on the site…that is…until I saw the site myself.  Having actually taken a look I have to say that, in my opinion, this site is just flat out unusable.   I’m honestly not even entirely sure what it does or why I would consider it useful.  It certainly doesn’t appear to be a meme tracker.  Worse though is the fact that the terrible UI design doesn’t give any hint as to what the site’s intended purpose is.  The about page says… 

We're building a reference site about blogging and the blogosphere, one day at a time. 

What?!?  What does that mean?  Sound like it’s a wiki though clearly that isn’t what it is. 

Well, I’d hoped this would segway into a more substantial post about meme trackers but as I’m sure many new bloggers have found sometimes posts don’t go where you expect them to.   Expect a meme trackers post at some point in the future I guess…

Addendum: Scott Lawton, founder of Blogcosm, posted a response to the blog posts generated by his initial interview.  Here’s an exceprt…

But Blogcosm is neither a search engine nor a "meme tracker". We're not a new challenge for Techmeme -- I think people may have read a bit too much between the lines. Initially I thought the title was just intentionally provocative. That may play a role, but perhaps the key word is actually "parse". Our approach to analyzing blogs is different than anything we've seen. (There's no shortage of interesting software opportunities; I've never been one to create "me too" products or sites.) Because we tackle fewer blogs, we can afford to provide more information about each. Marshall's post hit Techmeme -- our first bit of blog fame. Fame is fleeting.... That's ok, we're hard at work on gathering and organizing more data, and presenting it in ways that we think people will find useful. We've only just begun.