nodalpoint.org - Analysis of an artificial meme - Comments

23

Anonymous — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 11:28:41 -0400

23? Thou hast become an in-iniate. 23!

GoMeme from google's perspective

Anonymous — Mon, 13 Sep 2004 17:13:48 -0400

Nice idea. I came accross it when I saw that someone was using g-metrics to keep track of the googlecount of a strange string.

You may be interested to see the results, although the watch was initiated on Aug 30, when the experiment was over. (GoMeme 1.0 googlecount)

It would have been much more interesting had it been tracked from the begining of the experiment...

Panayotis.

No offence intended

Greg — Thu, 02 Sep 2004 08:35:19 -0400

While I do not feel that sentence implies anything negative about people over 60 not blogging, it if has offended anyone it was not intended to. I was made aware of age related prejudice in the work place after dicussing this issue with my mother. She is reluctant to divulge her age given people's assumptions about what people of a certain age should be doing (i.e. not teaching computers in her case).

My comment about internet access in nursing homes was simply a note to myself that I let slip throught in this piece. I am simply unaware of the fact, maybe someone can enlighten me :)

GUID

Greg — Wed, 01 Sep 2004 03:35:31 -0400

The data set I analyzed was from a google search for the guid from GoMeme 1.0, which is why I missed your post on DotNetJunkies. You are correct about the one entry per host problem and the amount of work to include those nodes. Using google turned out to be problematic due to the index not being consistent, it changes as the google engine adds more pages to the index, returning what it thinks are the most relevent to your search. The nuber of hits is usually the google engine's best estimate and the absolute nubmer present in the index. These are just impressions based on my use of the google API, I have not had them confirmed.

I thought people would get-over explicity spreading GoMemes after the first one, however I just noticed that GoMeme 2.0 seems to have some traction in the blogosphere.

Interesting thoughts, tracking is the problem...

Greg — Wed, 01 Sep 2004 03:30:21 -0400

Weblogs seem to be one of the only possbilities as they proved a certain amount of metadata with each post (times/dates). Interestingly the notion that ideas are not replicators but minds are (along with educational instutions/systems) has been explored by Liane Gabora in a paper with the same title: Ideas are not replicators but minds are.

Thanks for your comment.

I'm only 64

Anonymous — Tue, 31 Aug 2004 13:52:49 -0400

Dont be too hard on him (her?) - you were young once

Re: Analysis

Anonymous — Tue, 31 Aug 2004 13:04:02 -0400

By limiting your analysis to one entry per host name you miss a large number of blogs on places like radio, msdn or dotnetjunkies (my home).
With way too much work on your part you might be able to double or triple the sample size.

In addition you missed dotnetjunkies, which appeared fifth in Google's ranking: http://www.google.com/search?q=GoMeme+4.0&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&c2c...

Otherwise an interesting analysis

Cheers
Mark Levison
http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/mlevison/

the remark about people over 60

Anonymous — Mon, 30 Aug 2004 13:21:51 -0400

I was reading, absorbing, trying to understand what you were doing, then I came to this:

None of the bloggers were over 60 (do they have the Internet in nursing homes ?

That's out and out age bashing and it ruined everything, changed the tone from something serious to something sophomoric.

I have a friend who is over 60, no one would ever guess from the way she writes as she's hip to the times and expresses herself well enough to have a very young following. She's said there's no reason to reveal her age as it doesn't mean anything except how long she's had to experience everything, be witness to new technologies which she's embraced and continues to push to their limits and if people knew how old her birth certificate says she is, she wouldn't be taken seriously. How sad that society is so judgemental.

I think you owe everyone over 60 an apology and when you find yourself that age, you'll look back at this and cringe with embarrassment.

Meta-memetics and tracking

Anonymous — Sun, 29 Aug 2004 22:58:54 -0400

Hmm. Interesting. I'll throw a wrinkle in the works - might give you a different scale at which to work on the tracking scheme.

Given the definition of a meme as a self-propagating unit of information, it's my theory that all human knowledge is memetic in nature. We read to acquire it; we teach to pass it on. Some memes are more successful than others, at spreading or at sustainability; that's the self-propagation component. Memes will replicate in hard copy and in teachings that which successfully propagates in human minds.

Educational systems are propagation plants; every book that goes into a school has a life cycle. Some books are kept longer than others, even after many editions.

What would tracking text books look like?

It's not the human nodes that would be tracked, but the content itself.

Much larger scale, much longer time frames, more physical data (versus virtual).

Food for thought.

Or just a new meta-meme begging for propagation?

Best,
Rayne Today (http://blogs.salon.com/0001549)

Tracking native memes

Greg — Thu, 26 Aug 2004 08:46:12 -0400

Just to add a thought on tracking, I don't think that it will ever be an easy problem to solve. Universal ids on all posts along with the via link would require all blogging systems to inlcude that as (non)optional metadata. I don't spend my life follwoing blog technology so this may exist somewhere and I've just missed it.

Analysis of an artificial meme

Greg — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 02:11:09 -0400

PLEASE NOTE: Nodalpoint recently moved servers (we got cracked), during the move I lost the figures, images and data from this article.

Abstract

Looking for any possible distraction from writing my PhD thesis I have tracked and analyzed the first artificial meme (a GoMeme) through the blogosphere. The GoMeme was observed to mutate, and those mutations propagated. Limited evidence suggests that the network is scale free.

1. Introduction

A meme can be defined as self-propagating unit of information similar to the biological concept of a gene, the term was first used by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene). Familiar examples of Internet memes are well known: I kiss you, All your base are belong to us, The Nike sweatshop story and more recently p23s5 and the order of words meme. Memes are are often considered "idea viruses" that spread in communities, with many believing that various religions can be considered meme like. The study of memes, termed "memetics", has seen recent interest in the blogosphere, with many people keen to understand how ideas spread through weblogs. However the means of tracking memes, how network structure relates to the spread of memes and elucidation of the characteristics of a meme have not been well studied.