The press was the filter. And the press came to believe its own PR and it conflated size with authority: We are big, therefore we have authority; our authority comes from our bigness.

But the press, of all parties, should have seen that this didn’t give them authority, for the press was supposed to be in the business of going out to find the real authorities and reporting back to what they said.

This blog post is a good example of an ongoing dialog among the twitteratti that echos many of the questions we wrestled with when creating MemeStreams.

I've been thinking that Twitter is in fact solving the problem that MemeStreams sought to solve, moreso than Digg or the blogosphere have... Its the closest thing that has come along.

1. Smart people are using it.

2. Its people focused. You can see who the people you are following follow. Like our Audience and Sources.

3. Its uniform. There is a good chance that a link someone posted to twitter came from one of the twitter feeds they follow. Because you know what they are following and how to parse it, you can find out where things came from. This is different than the blogosphere, where you don't know what people are reading and chances are they are reading sources that post with different formats and software than they use.

4. Like MemeStreams, its a social network based on interest rather than relationship - you can follow anyone and they don't have to follow you back, or even know who the hell you are.

There are some things that you want that it doesn't have, such as automatic source attribution, but what it does have is a lot of people on it, the value of which cannot be overstated. It is also highly apied and programmable.

Twitter may be the most powerful tool that has come along for actual memetic analysis of Internet discussion.

Something interesting is about to happen here. There may be opportunities to create very powerful tools out of this.

Attention + Influence do not equal Authority