You'll notice a new box on the topic pages that shows you "popular topics." These topics are shown in order on a weekly basis. This is a minor thing but I think it will make the site a lot more usable for people who don't have accounts and may have trouble finding the content by drilling around in the topic higharchy...

More to come...

If you could make one small change to MemeStreams, what would it be?

Is "Memestreams" any good? In the last few days an experimental approach to diabetes management has been announced that might prevent nerve damage. That's huge news for tens of millions of Americans. It is not mentioned on Memestreams. Memestreams does clue us in to this news: "Student sets simultaneous world ice cream-eating record, worst ever ice cream headache."

Kevin Kelly says of the "Memestreams" site, "There's no better way to watch the hive mind." But the hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it?

This essay and the responses look like very interesting reading. Despite my creative editing here I think after a quick skim we actually address many of the concerns that he has with this kind of system.

Edge; DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism By Jaron Lanier

I'm a graduate student in the Kennedy School at Harvard. This short, anonymous, 5-minute survey is part of a research project that seeks to get a better understanding of why people use -- and how they value -- these collaborative news sites.

Collaborative News Survey

At several points in the past, we have attempted to get people to colonize a MemeStreams IRC channel. Each time, its had about the same result. Five or six people pop in the first day.. The times when people are chatting don't line up, and people stop coming. Then I see a trail of people entering and exiting for 15 minutes at a time for the next several days..

Lets try this again... This time, stay in the damn channel. Idle there. Attract some more people. It takes awhile for any given channel to grab traction.

The topic isn't limited to MemeStreams, but should have something to do with media, idea transfer, Internet issues, communication theory, or current events.

irc://irc.freenode.net:#memetics

Freenode is a great network. Its stable, there are numerous servers, and the channel/nick services work well so there is no need to have bots to administrate the channels.

For those that don't use IRC, its a very old chat protocol. There are numerous networks and a plethora of clients you can use to connect to it. Asking which client is the best to use is like asking for a major debate. I prefer XChat myself. The main site has the Windows and Linux clients. There is an OSX specific port as well.

MemeStreams/Memetics IRC Channel (again) - #memetics

Well, its that time of year again. MemeStreams is now handling about twice as much traffic as we where in 2003. There was a large, sustained jump of traffic around the Mike Lynn/Cisco fiasco. Some of this probably consists of actual readers, but a fair amount relates to the increase in our page rank due to inbound links from prominent websites.

Unfortunately, more page rank means more attention from referral spammers. A lot of our traffic consists of robots attempting to show up in aggregated statistics pages like the one linked here. These guys have been hitting us for years to no avail, and they just keep on coming.

You'll also notice a bunch of interesting new statistics that Rattle set up after he made session layer changes in mid-year to support them. They might tell you something about how much traffic your individual blog generates, if you are one of the top posters.

Happy New Year!

Statistics for memestreams.net (2005)

He hints that Shardanand's start-up may be looking at software that places different levels of "confidence" in articles, based on the author's reputation. It's an unproven idea, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. It could be a user-voting system (like eBay's ratings); a method based on the most-linked-to people (like Google News, except for individuals); or an approach that uses collaborative filtering, sending a user a "liberal" or "conservative" version of a story based on the articles she's chosen before (like TiVo and Firefly).

A long and controversial article at SF Weekly complains about Craigslist's consumption of the newspaper classified ad business, and then goes on to provide a number of details about Newmark's attempt to create something an aweful lot like MemeStreams.

sfweekly.com | Craig$list.com

Newmark said his news project will involve Web technology to let readers decide which news stories are the most important. At least one Web site is already working this field. Digg.com invites readers to submit stories to be posted on its Web site. "Once a story receives enough (votes) from (the site's visitors) it will be promoted to the front page," the site explains.

What a great idea!

Internet Daily: Craigslist plans to make news

Decius and Rattle will be representing Industrial Memetics at PhreakNIC this year by giving a talk entitled "Information Warfare for The People". Everyone is encouraged to attend. The talk will be at 3pm on Saturday. Please refer to the speakers page and schedule for more information. We look forward to seeing you all.

In addition to this, Decius will be delivering his yearly rant at 10pm Saturday night.

Industrial Memetics is also sponsoring the hotel's contention TV channel. During the day, the TV channel will be showing the talks. At night, it will be showing whatever content we can put up without licensing concerns cued by [adult swim] style bumps. In an effort to make the channel as open as possible, we are encouraging convention attendees to bring with them any content they would like to see on the station in file format that VLC will play, burned to either CDs or DVDs. Make sure its something that does not require a license for us to use. Find Rattle at the convention on Friday and give him whatever you have.

... and that's far from being all the content at the convention from MemeStreams related people.

Fellow MemeStreamer and Industrial Memetics Resident Engineer Acidus will be giving a talk entitled "Layer 7 Fun: Extending Web Apps in Interesting Ways" on Friday at 6pm. This talk encompasses using web applications such as Google Mail for uses they were not intended for.

Virgil will be giving an updated version of his talk on "Artificial Intelligence". MaxieZ will be giving a talk entitled "Web Security 101". Dolemite, who is also running the con, is going to be talking about "MythTV". And much, much, much more..

Be there, or be ^2.

'Information Warfare for The People' | Decius and Rattle to speak at PhreakNIC 2005

You may have noticed that I haven't been posting much. I don't plan to post for a while. I am hereby turning over all reponsibility for administration of this site to Nick Levay (Rattle). I am not managing MemeStreams or Industrial Memetics for the time being. All queries should be sent to Nick.

I think its appropriate for this community to be able to express its views without implicating any conflicts of interest that I may have, so I am stepping back for now. The perspective of this community belongs to the community and not to me or Nick or anyone else.

Furthermore, to avoid any rumors, there has been absolutely nothing from any of the parties involved in this dispute that has prompted this action, nor to I really believe that any of the parties involved in this dispute would have a problem with what this site consists of, presuming they understood what it is. This is simply a precautionary measure that I am taking to avoid any potential problems and to ensure the freedom of the people in this comunity to express their views.

It is my sincere hope that all of this drama dies down as quickly as it began.