Attack of the Memeorandum clones

First came the Digg clones, which it seems will soon number over 100. There are Digg clones for Tolkien, hip-hop and wrestling, all with the hallmark big-fonted vote count. Now Memeorandum is the subject of its own round of clustered, automated news aggregators clones, three of which have bobbed up in the last couple of days.

Matthew Chen's Megite got some Arrington love, and there's no question it's a Memeorandum clone. It has the same clustering technique on display. However, Megite does a fantastic job of making us think Memeorandum's design, characterised by many as ugly, isn't that bad after all. Not that Megite has a boring colour scheme or unnecessary graphical elements - even its logo is just text (but Comic Sans, wtf!!). It's just that it expands everything on the page where Memeorandum has optional dropdowns, making the page way longer than it should be (at least to Meme vets). It will take a bit of getting used to, if Matthew sticks with it. As to the quality of results, there are some obvious bugs that it would be uncharitable to point out at this early stage, but I wish Matthew the best of luck in fixing them. I particularly like the Entertainment section, that looks spiffy.

Newroo hasn't launched yet, although they showed that they're not stupid by giving TechCrunch an exclusive screenshot (damn, wish I'd thought of that). The two principals are Brian Norgard, who (if my Google-fu is accurate) is/was president of two other non-dotcom startups called Ferrosity and Function Training, and Dan Gould. Looks like Brian's the business guy and Dan's the coder. As an Australian, I object to them using a kangaroo as part of their logo, especially since their cartoon roo is coloured blue, a shade you would never find in any actual animal of that species. Aren't there any animals native to the San Francisco area they could use instead? I hear the quail is a good local candidate, it's the state bird of California. It's not too late to change the name of the company to Quailnews. There's even a free pun in there about quaaludes, dudes. Edgy!

UPDATE: Oops, I left out Laurence Timms' Chuquet, which I had meant to cover. First things first: sorry, that sienna/ochre/puce colour scheme makes me want to blow chunqs. Another site which makes one pine for the soothing aquamarines of Memeorandum. As for the content, it wins points for having a Japanese language blog in there, and the Flickr wall is interesting as a novelty. Why are there so few snippets of text from the clustered stories? And what's with the "Hotlinks - Level 1" business? All these issues can be easily fixed, and I'm sure will be. Whether "fixed" means "made to conform with Memeorandum" or not I don't know. Gabe has so much set the template for this area that I don't know how others can innovate in design while not alienating users. Most of the Digg clones don't mess with what works.