Freshly minted Memeorandum.com is not bad...And lessons in how bloggers get media attention
Gabe Rivera, founder of memeorandum.com certainly knows how to get my attention. I had just sat down at the far end of the table, at the recent dinner to welcome Microsoft uberblogger Robert Scoble to town.
It was a Saturday evening and the assembled leading lights of the blogosphere were all tired and cranky after a week of Web 2.0, 1.0 and 0.2 events; while Robert Scoble had skipped the conference entirely and was all fresh and friendly and looking well-rested.
Seconds after I had shaken hands with my end of the table, which included Niall Kennedy from Technorati, the stranger sitting opposite, said, "So...you cover Silicon Valley from San Francisco...?"
It took me but a nanosecond to parry that remark and ram it back in my eloquent manner:
Fu*k you, I said, and you think that Silicon Valley ends anywhere?! I sniggered...
I'm driving from San Francisco to San Jose all week long, I explained, that's how SVW gets original stories, scoops, exclusives. [Silicon Valley Watcher had $400m in M&A deals last week that were scoops and published hours and days ahead of anybody else.] Other hacks are sitting at their desks rewriting press releases or Reuters copy--you won't get any scoops doing that.
Anyway, I see Silicon Valley as a blob that has extended from its Palo Alto center and now runs fifty miles in all directions; north across the Golden Gate bridge up to edges of the Sonoma wine country, south to San Jose and further to the surfer town of Santa Cruz, and across the entire length of the East Bay.
Gabe and I get along very well now, and at the recent Slide.com sliding out party, we talked for a long time about some ideas for new types of media business models we could try, but more on that later.
BTW, everybody keeps telling me that Gabe's site is really hot. And all the uberbloggers seem to agree, plus one lady told me it was "life changing."
With such testimonials I just had to take a look, and I must say, memeorandum.com is not bad, ...not bad at all. Take a look and see for yourself.
