1. There will be a site update in 24 to 72 hours that will change the way MemeStreams handles cookies. The end result of this will be that everyone will be logged out of the site and will have to log back in. Your old cookie will be bunk. We apologize for the inconvenience but we think its a minor hassle versus the amout of trouble associated with having to handle the old cookies in the code.

2. There will be a second site update some number of days after the first in which the little recommend bookmarklet will be disabled. We have decided that the little bookmarklet is inefficient and does not have enough room to display the user interface elements we want to display properly. Furthermore, it is much easier to edit a significant amount of text in a bigger window. We suggest that if you are using the little bookmarklet, you ough to upgrade to the big bookmarklet. You'll find it much nicer.

Thank you for your kind attention. We will now return to your regularly scheduled memes....

ATLANTA, Georgia (June 17th, 2005) - The Board of Directors of the Industrial Memetics Institute strongly condemns allegations made earlier this month by Amnesty International that its software development operations in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba are "the gulag of our times."

Industrial Memetics President and Chief Executive Officer, Tom Cross, said "The comparison is completely unreasonable. Russian Gulags were places in which thousands were worked to death in the oppressive Siberian winter. Our people in Cuba are well fed, gainfully employed, and air conditioned! A job at Industrial Memetics is a fine and valuable life endeavor. If circumstances where different these people might have wasted away in shanty towns in Rio de Janeiro or been forced to sell themselves in the AIDS infested sex markets of South Africa." He added that "people who think critically about Industrial Memetics hate America."

Industrial Memetics Chief Technology Officer, Nick Levay, said "The recent claims that one of our managers flushed a Koran down the toilet are completely unsubstantiated. Why would there be a Koran in an Industrial Memetics office?! We don't allow any religious artifacts to enter the building. Acknowledgment of religion is completely forbidden at the Industrial Memetics Institute."

Industrial Memetics Secretary of Defense Billy Hoffman said, "Our competitors are trained to make outrageous claims about our workplace practices. These claims should be ignored. They are obviously part of their overall strategy to slow the pace of innovation and flood the market with inferior products."

The Industrial Memetics Institute is committed to its goal of producing the finest technology and services money can buy. Industrial Memetics stands by its work place environment as being "a hell of a lot better then a Russian Gulag." (TM)

ABOUT THE INDUSTRIAL MEMETICS INSTITUTE

The Industrial Memetics Institute is a leading distributor of adult entertainment via electronic platforms. The Company delivers the most extensive lineup of quality programming over the broadest range of electronic means, including cable, satellite, Broadband and video-on-demand.

This news release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. The forward-looking statements are based on current expectations, estimates and projections made by management. The Company intends for the forward-looking statements to be covered by the safe harbor provisions for forward-looking statements. Words such as "anticipates", "expects", "intends", "plans", "believes", "seeks", "estimates", or variations of such words are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, Mr. Cross's ability to create even more value for our shareholders, and the outcome of any contingencies. All forward-looking statements made in this press release are made as of the date hereof, and the Company assumes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements included in this news release whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. The forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those set forth or implied by any forward-looking statements.

For more information please visit our website at www.industrialmemetics.com.

Some day, God willing, the streets will flow with the blood of people who use one of a multitude of unicode apostrophy characters instead of a simple ascii apostrophy in english text. Until that day, we must continue our struggle.

My recent Unicode fix was not sufficient. I converted characters coming in from the bookmartlet into a format which displayed properly in the edit box. Some of these characters managed to make it unmangled from the edit box through the browser form submission and into the database. Others, unfortunately, were lost, somewhere between the browser's form processing code and the perl CGI subsystem they were martyred.

In order to address this I've managed to find a way to trick web browsers into not mangling these characters. They should show up as ampersand codes in the editor, and the correct characters in your blog.

This should eliminate most of the annoyances with unicode characters in memes. It also means that you can meme foreign text such as Polish (ehm, Elonka) or Japanese (see below) and it will look right.

The lame thing is that its really hard to tell what the hell you are editing when you are dealing with foreign language text in the editor. However, as we don't currently have many non-english users this is a problem I'll save for later.

Anyway, as always, lemme know if there is a problem.

(If you are going to steal japanese text from somebody you might as well do it from these guys:)
特許庁ホームページ

This is interesting.

Traffic Rank for memestreams.net: 456,843

Not very good...

People who visit this page also visit:

Their list is fairly accurate. I wonder where they are collecting the data...

Related Info for: memestreams.net

The MemeStreams site code has been updated to fix a number of issues with RSS.

1) All feeds are now RSS 2.0.
2) Links in meme descriptions have been slightly reformatted for clarity.
3) The main page's RSS feed now includes the author of the post.
4) Browsers such as Safari will now detect RSS feeds.

RSS feeds are not just for news readers. It is possible to power an external website using your RSS feed. My website is an example of this. There are numerous libraries available that allow you include content from your RSS feed in other webpages. I'm currently using a PHP library called OnyxRSS, which no longer appears to be available. Magpie may currently be the best option available to others looking to do something similar.

MemeStreams Site Update: RSS Improvements

The system of bracket quotations has been killed. I have cut the site over to using blockquote tags, and the italics that were popular early in the history of the site.

Text enclosed in "blockquote" tags, or "bq" for short, look like this!

I have not, and won't convert all of the old posts in the system. Such a process is fraught with peril. Going forward, things will look nicer. In a few weeks you won't even recall the old quoting system.

As always, let us know if there are any problems.

Several annoyances with the threads have been repaired:

1. Previously the URL was displayed at the top of a thread. This made the thread hard to read in browsers that will not wrap long lines of unbroken text. The URL has been replaced with its title.

2. The redundant post cleaner is now smarter, and it lists the names of the people whose posts were cleaned at the bottom of the thread.

3. A small UI change was made to make the thread look more like a thread. This change was applied to the memebox as well. In particular, the sender's name was moved to the top. In a discussion you want to see the person's name first.

I just posted a code update, which clears up some minor annoyances with the recommend function.

1. Escapped unicode characters in html selected by the bookmarklet should now be handled properly.

2. When you click recommend in the site there is no longer a pop-up.

3. You can now include HREF links in your posts. Standard html format.

Let me know if there are any problems.

This post concerns MemeStreams and privacy. Its long, and the MemeStreams specific discussion is at the end. If you are concerned about privacy please read it.

dmv wrote:
] They probably weren't interested in figuring out what you were
] looking for.
] But evil?

I want to make it clear that I'm not particularly concerned about how Google plans to use the data Google is collecting. I'm sure they are merely interested in providing the best search experience they can provide. I don't think Google is "evil." I agree that the people who are spreading the "Google is evil" meme are usually exaggerating and typically think when companies become too large and successful they become evil by virtue of their success. I do not share this point of view.

However, I DO think Google is negligent. I'm concerned about how OTHER people who access this data use it. If you have a static IP, or if I know your Google cookie, or if I have information from your ISPs logs about dynamic IPs assigned to your account and the associated timeframes, I can subpoena all of Google's logs of every search you have performed going back as long as Google has been around. This isn't hypothetical. People are actually doing this.

Google, and most other search engines, refer to the webserver log information they retain as anonymous information in their privacy policies. This is misleading. This information is not anonymous. It is possible to tie it back to individual people accurately.

Because Google is such a good search engine a lot of people use it frequently. It is their gateway into the information on the Internet. They tell Google everything they are looking for. By looking at this log information I can get a pretty good idea of what those people have been thinking about. This is incredibly invasive. Big brother is recording everything you search for on the Internet. In certain circumstances this information will be revealed, particularly when you are a defendent in a civil or criminal proceeding.

While the same sort of log information might be obtained from any other website on the Internet, it is a particular concern in the context of Google, because Google is so popular, and because Google is a gateway into all of the other sites. You can learn much more about a person from their Google logs then you can from just about any other website's logs. Google is now in a unique position where their web server logs are an extremely valuable resource for surveillance if and when they fall into the wrong hands. Failing to handle that responsibility in an appropriate way is negligent.

This isn't happenning enough to have large numbers of people concerned about it, but it is happenning, and it is going to happen more over time. Ultimately, it is going to be a problem. The responsible thing for Google to do would be to expunge these logs after a reasonable period of time. Otherwise, people will eventually change the wa... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

Big Google and Big MemeStreams and Big Brother

We pushed an update out to the site today. This update includes changes to the MemeBox, an update logo graphic, and numerous behind the scenes type things.

Thanks to Joe Gawlik (terratogen) for the new MemeStreams logo!

Let Decius or I know if you spot any problems...

MemeStreams Site Update, 4/20/2005