Rattle's comments:

For several months now, work has been underway building the next version of MemeStreams. It has been necessary to recode most of the site from scratch, so its taking awhile. At any given time the trials of life, lack of funding, bad timing, hardware failure, and general bad luck is screwing up the works. However, we _are_ making progress.

Just before the new year, I hit the point in the development process where new capabilities of mining and graphing social network data were becoming available. I decided to go off on a little tangent, embrace the milestone, and do something to show our technology's progress. The result is the Year in Graphs 2003. Over the course of putting this together I've wound up fixing all kinds of problems with our database conversion code and wrote much of what will become the new graphing engine. I even had a really good "eureka" moment in relation to some of our network theory.. Its been time usefully spent.

That being said, this is all very kludgy. I did not spend that much time crossing I's and dotting T's.. The fonts in the nodes are hard to read, some of the graphs look "squished", its missing the "Show Links" feature the current Social Network portion of the sites has, etc.. There is much room for improvement with our graphing. I look forward to additional feedback.. :)

While these graphs may be fun to look at, the data they are built with is what's really exciting.. The same thing that allowed me to make these graphs is what's going to lead to improvements in the capabilities of the Reputation Agent.

Anyway, I hope you all enjoy browsing through this review of the past year!

MemeStreams - The Year in Graphs 2003

Here it is folks, the 2003 usage statistics for Memestreams.net! I wanted to have this out sooner but I rang in the new year on a ski slope in West Virginia.

As you can see, the site is continuing to grow. Its worth comparing this with the statistics from 2002, which are at http://www.memestreams.net/awstats.html

The monthly usage graph is drawn to scale, so keep in mind that the usage in Jan 2003 is greater then the usage in Dec 2002. Scale the graphs in your head and you can see the progression. We are still trucking forward, and yet we are still very much in the early part of a network effects curve. This years Unique Visitors number is just a little over an order of magnitude larger then last year's. I hope to see another order of magnitude increase next year.

An interesting thing occurred in September of 2003. We got referral spammed. This means that a group of people set up robots which hit our site and claimed to be a web browser which came in from a link on a site that these people are trying to advertise. As a result I can't show you the statistics for referrals from other websites. They are spammed out. This also means that there was a bit of a spike in the overall numbers in September. The later months of the year were also impacted by the holidays. People simply tend to use the internet a lot less over Thanksgiving and Christmas.

In any event, hope you find this all interesting, and Happy New Year!

Statistics of www.memestreams.net for 2003

] freenode exists to provide an interactive environment for
] coordination and support of peer-directed projects,
] including those relating to free software and open
] source. Our network is currently implemented using
] Internet Relay Chat (IRC). Our aim is to help improve the
] communicative and collaborative skills of our
] participants and to maintain a friendly, efficient
] environment for project coordination and technical
] support.

We have been meaning to colonize an IRC channel for awhile now. We couldn't make our mind up about which which network. Freenode is great. Its the perfect network for us.

irc.freenode.net, #meme ... Colonize it.

For more information on Freenode, click thru and check out the FAQ & Philosophy pages.

MemeStreams IRC Channel

Rattle wrote:
] As promised, I have an update of the statistics regarding our
] traffic increase following the start of the war.

I think its PATENTLY OBVIOUS that the administration of THIS WEBSITE is the REAL FORCE behind this illegal war!!

Follow the *money*!!! WHO BENEFITS??!! Obviously evil media corporations like Industrial Memetics.

It is clear that the administration of this website used their secret ties with the Bush administration to push for this war in a bid to increase revenues.

I'll bet there is a big contract in store for Halliburton building website infrastructure.

BASTARDS!

Fuck MemeStreams!
NO BLOOD FOR PAGE VIEWS!!

RE: War! Huh.. Yeah.. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.^W^WWeb site growth.

I thought this was entertaining, if nothing else.

RaverPorn, for better or for worse, was one of the first links ever recommended on MemeStreams. This was well over a year ago, back when recommending links was pretty much all you could do with MemeStreams, and a few of us were playing around with it to see how well it worked.

About 6-7 months ago I posted an update to the site that provided a unique url for each entry on the site which could be indexed by search engines. Eventually, the crawlers found their way into the site, and, or course, found RaverPorn.

As the search results have came back, it turns out that "raver porn password" has consistently been one of the Google search terms that results in the most hits for MemeStreams. This is a combination of the popularity of this search, the fact that most of the sites on the net that talk about Raver Porn use a lot of search engine manipulation techniques, which ironically lower their rank on Google versus sites like this one, and the fact that people looking for raver porn are pretty indiscriminate in their search for it.

So, at the end of the year I posted the 2002 MemeStreams site usage statistics. These statistics include the popular search terms that result in hits on this site. One of those search terms is "raver porn password."

Of course, this page was indexed by Google, and now shows up in searches for "raver porn password." The Google cache of this page is now the top Google cache hit for this site. Also, interestingly, people seem to be 3 to 4 times more likely to hit the Google cache of this page then to hit the actual page itself. (People searching for Raver Porn Passwords know that they are much more likely to find them in Google's cache then on an actual website.)

I thought that this was an interesting observation. It might be possible to build other kinds of search engine feedback loops... A page, or better, a network of pages, that adapt their content based on the search results they get, trying to maximize their hit count. What purpose this would serve I have no idea. Art?

] This section involves two tools, one for Windows, and one
] for OSX, which allow you to select text in any
] application, hit a hot key, and receive search results
] for that text. Both tools perform Google searches, and
] both have been adapted to perform MemeStreams searches as
] well.
]
] The power of these tools is that they extend searching
] such that it becomes a kind of augmented knowledge
] system. When you are reading or writing something, and
] you come upon a subject that you want more information
] about, you can get access to more information at the
] touch of a mouse.

MemeStreams makes you smarter!

If you had trouble searching for new users on the user weblogs page or in the bookmarklet, well it was broken, but its not anymore. Just FYI.

There was a site outage from about 12:30 CST last night until 8:30 CST this morning. I hope you were asleep. The problem is resolved. There was nothing I could do about this, but I have made arrangements so that I'll be able to respond to these incidents more rapidly when they occur during this timeframe in the future.

This is extremely belated. You may have noticed the orange XML icons in the lower right corner of some of the MemeStreams pages. We've added RSS support. This means you can view MemeStreams using RSS aggregators and headline scrollers (AmphetaDesk, NewsMonster, Faust's Friend). The topic pages and user weblogs are supported. The XML icons link to the RSS output. However, you can reach it by adding "?type=rss" to the end of a MemeStreams URL.

Rattle did this feature in some sort of insane 24 hour coding binge. He deserves props.

You can now submit your MemeStreams page to weblog aggregators like Blogdex and Daypop. We'll be turning the main page in to these services this weekend.

] A link to a site you read isnt the same as a link to
] someone you know through their blog or someone you
] actively collaborate with.
]
] After reviewing data of work relationships, information
] flows and knowledge exchanges from hundreds of consulting
] assignments inside Fortune 2000 organizations Valdis
] Krebs did not see much evidence of power laws in this
] data. His data is of confirmed ties [both persons
] agreed/recognized their mutual
] interactions/flows/relationships] from a worldwide pool
] of clients dating back to 1988. Of course he found some
] people were better connected than others, but the extreme
] hubs found in power law networks just were not evident.

Ross Mayfield's Weblog: Looking at weblog networks