] Searching for sudden "bursts" in the usage of particular
] words could be used to rapidly identify new trends and
] sort information more efficiently, says a US computer
] scientist.

Finding emerging fads in blog data

You've probably noticed that the look of the site is dramatically different. My goal with this is to make the site a little easier on the eyes.

The biggest change in this release is the Social Network Maping. If you click on the Social Network links around the site you'll be able to see who is linking who. The maps are interactive; you can move through the network from link to link by clicking on people's names.

This data is all based on Recommendations (not clickthroughs). It provides an excellent way to get feedback about the links you are providing. As the community is small, most people are connected to a small group of frequent posters. However, as the site grows, this feature should provide an interesting way to surf through the social network on the site in search of interesting people. Rattle deserves all of the credit for this feature.

The MemeBox has been updated. The frames version was a little cramped. This should be more comfortable to use.

New users will not show up in the recent posters list until they've recommend an article. I also fixed a bug with selecting multiple paragraphs of text with the bookmarklet.

] The basic shape is simple - in any system sorted by rank,
] the value for the Nth position will be 1/N. For whatever
] is being ranked -- income, links, traffic -- the value of
] second place will be half that of first place, and tenth
] place will be one-tenth of first place. (There are other,
] more complex formulae that make the slope more or less
] extreme, but they all relate to this curve.) We've seen
] this shape in many systems. What've we've been lacking,
] until recently, is a theory to go with these observed
] patterns.

This same pattern is present in the MemeStreams community.

Several weeks ago, I posted up some of Rattle's proof of concept work (http://www.memestreams.net/visual.html) in this area. Since that time, he's been working on code to produce detailed statistics and enable visual navigation of the social network present on MemeStreams. Its cool. You are all going to love it. :)

Shirky: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality

I actually wrote documentation today. Hopefully this will make it a little easier for people to get oriented and figure the site out.

[[ MemeStreams ]] Documentation

Lots of changes to circle management for scalability.

1. When you are forwarding a recommendation, you can type in a username, nickname, email address, or real name into the "add user or email address" field. It will match this information with the username of the person you are looking for and add that username to the destination list for your Meme.

2. The best way to add someone to a circle is to click on that person's name somewhere in the site. This will take you to their "about me" page, at which you can add them to circles. You can search for people using the search engine on the /people page.

3. The Manage Circles page now allows you to move people between two different circles.

As always, please tell me if you have any troubles.

Please read and rerecommend. I want this to get as much coverage on the site as possible, and I want feedback.

Currently the privacy policy says that your reputation tables are private. This reflects the fact that I think what you read ought to be your own business.

However, what you recommend is not exactly the same as what you read, and this is reflected in the reputation data. When you recommend something you are telling the site that you like it. Telling the site implies that you don't mind the site knowing. In fact, you want the site to know. If I do a little digging I can see who you got an article from, directly. This is a bit of an oversite. Something that can be "matured" out of the code. Thats one direction to go in from here. Keep the reputation data as private as possible.

However, if I monitor the site, and I see a certain person recommend an article, and then you rerecommend it, I'll know where you got it from. I do this often enough, in an automated fashion, for long enough, and I'll get a pretty good understanding of who you are reading. The site can't protect you from this. By recommending articles you are making them public. By making them public, you are giving up some of your privacy.

The only way to truely protect the fact that you are reading someone's recommendations is to never recommend their recommendations. They will still show up in the agent, but this information, I think, is private and ought to stay that way.

However, and as I've hopefully illustrated, the recommendations are public in a very real way. What I want to ask the site is if the recommendation DATA ought to be public too.

The reason I want to ask you this is because Rattle has assembled another visualization. This visualization is interactive. You can see a graph of the people who are highly connected to you, click on their names, and see a graph of the people who are highly connected to them, and so on.

Right now this data is amusing but not all that rich. There are about 15 people who regularily post to the site, and they hold all the reputation capital. Everyone's graphs look pretty similar, because we are all really recommending content from the same 15 people, even those of us who don't often recommend content and who aren't often read.

This is going to change.

As this site scales, clusters are going to form. I think the one that currently exists will always exist, but there will be others. People will begin to have different perspectives on the data, based on their interests. Thats what this site is designed to do.

And as those different communities of interest begin to form, the maps of the reputation data rattle is developing will become richer, and you will be able to surf through MemeStreams via the reputation system, hopping from person to person in search of interesting ideas.

I think this is a very compelling feature set, and I want to enable it. But, I've promised to keep your reputation data private. All of it. This promise may not have been very well thought out, but I did make it. So I can only break it with your permission, and that is what I am asking for.

I want to publish your recommendation related reputation data. Your clickthrough related reputation data will stay private. What is published is the number of times you have rerecommended articles from another person on the site, in the form of a graph.

Its similar to the graph on the "Visualizing Memestreams" page, but it is labelled, and interactive.

] You commented one time on how the archival nature of the web
] preserves the things we say and do to a greater extent than
] before. That it's harder to hide or ignore our past. Do you
] think this makes it harder to move on or grow? Our society
] certainly has a fetish about unearthing dirt in peoples pasts.
] And it's often used against them. I feel the combination of
] these two things, combined with the idea/person intermingling,
] inhibit me from wanting to engage in a completely open
] discussion on-line.

This is an awesome post. I'm going to go back and edit this reply with some thoughts about this, but for now, I thought I'd pop it into my MemeStream so that others can take a look...

Identity, privacy, and discourse on the web.

The biggest change in this code release is the user list. It has been replaced with some shorter lists as well as a user search engine. There are also a few minor bug fixes in this release that impact other parts of the site.

The MemeBox has been significantly improved. It is now organized like an email inbox, which should make it a lot easier to manage lots of memes. The "P" stands for private. It means that the message in question was sent to you in private (ie, not posted to a thread or memestream).

I am using frames for this, and this is a "correct" use of frames. However, I'm not sure how well this is going to play with various browsers, so please let me know if you have any trouble.

The new Reputation Agent has been significantly improved.

1. The agent will always show you highly rated new content. Previously the agent only showed you content from the people with the highest reputations. It will now find the highest rated content for the time period, even if your highest rated contributors haven't posted anything new.

2. The timeframe for the agent now defaults to Since Last Visit. If you don't touch the agent for 3 hours your visit is considered to be over, and the next time you use the agent content will be collected from the time your last visit ended.

3. The mode selector is gone. The agent now uses a hybrid mode. This should make the agent a lot easier for new users to understand.