Memeorandum Search API
Assuming that memeorandum provides value (and I think it does as a component of an overall view of the web, not as a sole view of the web), there’s an aspect of memeorandum that I find lacking, and that’s an addressable history. Gabe provides the ability to go and see what tech.memeorandum.com looked like at a particular moment in time, but there’s no good way to search that history. As I mentioned a few posts ago, being able to see the total comment-sphere of a particular post would be very helpful, and being able to look for a particular url in the memeorandum history would also be helpful.
Here’s what I’d like to see in a memeorandum search API:
- send it a complete url and return the whole memeorandum cosmos around that post - including all items that were ever related to it and all comments of the root post and the related ones. Also return all the items the sent url was ever related to or noted as a comment to.
- model a rudimentary stemming method so that sending a url fragment (perhaps only the beginning of one, such as a host address) would return a cosmos of all the items which that url was noted as a commentor to. Building on the concept of a url representing a person, this could represent a fragment of the most broadly dispersed attention focci of a particular author. Optionally also return all the items where that url was within a top-level or related post.
- alternately publish all of the above with some sort of time-bound display, so you can view the flow of conversation over time.
There’s obviously tons more that could be done with this, but as a blog research tool even these basics would be a big step forward in expanding how memeorandum might be useful as something more than a mechanism for seeing the current flash-in-the-pan topic of conversation.
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