] Reenie's head chip woke her by steadily increasing
] the perceived volume of a song by a British comedy
] troupe. Lots of trippy dreams last night. She
] couldn't remember them all this morning, but she was
] sure they were cool. She rolled out of bed and prepared
] for her "Commute" to the adjoining room. Reenie
] loved her job, well, as much as she could love any job.
] She got to work from home as much as she liked.

If you liked "Ownz0red" by Cory Doctorow, which many of you did, you will definitely like this quick little 10 minute read.

Futurismic: Fiction

] When scientists wanted to explore what kind of life might
] exist on Mars, public television's "NOVA" recorded the
] building and launch of the rovers sent to the planet.
]
] Now, a year later, the "NOVA" team is back with "Welcome
] to Mars," featuring data collected by the robots as they
] searched for signs that the planet may once have harbored
] tiny forms of life. The program airs at 8 tonight on PBS.

This was fun. Hope you can catch the rerun.

'NOVA' welcomes viewers to Mars - 01/04/05

] Lots of discussion going on about 'folksonomies' --
] bottom-up taxonomies that people create on their own --
] as used in Del.icio.us and Flickr...

Memeing for my own reference. No time to read it now.

Slashdot | Folksonomies In Del.icio.us and Flickr

] Of course librarians, teachers, and academics don't
] like the Wikipedia. It works without privilege, which is
] inimical to the way those professions operate.
]
] This is not some easily fixed cosmetic flaw, it is the
] Wikipedia's driving force. You can see the reactionary
] core of the academy playing out in the horror around
] Google digitizing books held at Harvard and the Library
] of Congress the NY Times published a number of
] letters by people insisting that real scholarship would
] still only be possible when done in real libraries.

Shirky's response is entertaining and well written and completely misses the point. There is an argument between internet people and people who like the way books smell about how to build information resources. There is a completely different discussion that says, we like wikipedia and believe in this model, but we acknowledge that its not perfected. How do you make wikipedia more useful then it is. Its more useful if I don't have to worry about the information being edited by a troll right before I check it. It would be more useful if the data in the articles was referenced. To discuss how to make it more useful is not to say it isn't useful now or that the internet and openness are bad. The thing has flaws and we ought to work on addressing them. If we're not willing to think critically about things that we are building that have become popular simply because we're afraid of conceding a point to the "other guys" everything we build is going to fail.

Many-to-Many: K5 Article on Wikipedia Anti-elitism

] Jonathan Grella, a DeLay spokesman, said DeLay still
] believed it was legitimate to allow a leader to retain
] his post while under indictment. But Grella said that by
] reinstating the rule that he step aside, DeLay was
] "denying the Democrats their lone issue. Anything that
] could undermine our agenda needs to be nipped in the
] bud."

My Way News: Republicans back down on House ethics rule

From the web page:

"Have you found a really neat web site that does not rank highly on Google yet? Sure, there are many ways that you could tell other people about it (e.g., add a link to it from your web page, give it a "thumbs up" on StumbleUpon, mention it in a newsgroup, etc).

But why not make such a recommendation as part of a game where your score will depend on the actual Google ranking achieved by the site in the future? Why not find out who is the very best at predicting which sites people will like and that will rank higher on Google as a result?

And why not also make predictions about web sites whose Google ranking will likely go down in the future?

The Speculative Search Game allows you to make such predictions in a competitive environment."

Speculative Search Game (Google Game)

noteworthy wrote:
] I understood increased scalability to be a primary purpose of
] your ongoing efforts to reengineer the MemeStreams code base
] and web site. If the numbers are really leveling off, are
] further efforts in this area warranted?

Yes, of course. If I've led you to believe that changes are being made in order to ward off an impending self destruction due to over population I apologize. Thats not what we're doing at all.

Furthermore, I don't believe that we are growing fast enough. There are 27 million people out there who read weblogs according to Pew. I have about 30,000 of them, tops. There are probably slightly less then 1000 people who really read this site regularly. Obviously less then 50 who post frequently. It could be a whole lot bigger, but it will only happen if it gets better.

There are some scalability related fixes that need to be made, but most of the current effort has to do with three things:

1. Fixing a multitude of problems with the user interface that are either annoying, or confusing, or both.
2. Changing the database and code so that it is properly structured for growth both in terms of readership and in terms of features.
3. Adding some new features that everyone wants, such as pictures...

The only way this is going to actually happen is if we get some help. There is a lot of code to write a no one has time to write it. The process needs to consist of a lot of people writing small amounts of code rather then a small number of people writing a lot of code. Fortunately a few people have volunteered to help out...

] The awstats do tell me something about the usage of the site,
] but it leaves out a significant data point. It's not
] something you will find in the httpd logs, but rather in the
] database itself. That is the level of activity on the part of
] registered users, not just in 'hits' and 'visits', but in
] terms of the memes themselves.

You're absolutely right.

Two data points of interest:
1. 123 Authenticated users logged in during December. The majority of them visited a fair number of pages. Only 8 visited a total of one page.

2. As of right now there have been 16,842 memes posted to memestreams during its lifetime. 6,639 of them were recommended during 2004. (This information is easy to glean from the thread ID numbers.)

We've already created some code in the new codebase that will track users more carefully so that we can get an accurate count of READERS rather then unique IP addresses and hits.

RE: 2004 Statistics for www.memestreams.net

] By the end of 2004 blogs had established themselves as a
] key part of online culture. Two surveys by the Pew
] Internet & American Life Project in November established
] new contours for the blogosphere: 8 million American
] adults say they have created blogs; blog readership
] jumped 58% in 2004 and now stands at 27% of internet
] users; 5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators
] or XML readers to get the news and other information
] delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is
] posted online; and 12% of internet users have posted
] comments or other material on blogs. Still, 62% of
] internet users do not know what a blog is.

Full report here...

Pew Internet & American Life Project: Blogosphere

] Wikipedia is under criticism by its co-founder Larry
] Sanger who has left the project. He warns of a possible
] future fork due to Wikipedia's Anti-Elitism and he
] presents his view on Wikipedia's (lack of) reliability.

I've been wondering when this was going to start. The "anyone can edit this" mantra has finally found some respected detractors. The question is, how do you decide who is an expert?

Slashdot | Wikipedia Criticised by Its Co-founder

peekay wrote:
] Some people believe that PY2005 (Political Year 2005) will be
] the year of Social Security in the States. Edward H. Crane of
] CATO (Libertarian "think tank") consolidates a lot of
] pro-privatization views in this piece.

Actually, this article confirms that the liberals are right, astonishingly.

In investing, typically you have a scale of choices that range from low risk, low return to high risk, high return.

This article says "The goal of Social Security reform should be to provide workers with the best possible retirement option, not simply to preserve the current system. If solvency were the only goal, that could be accomplished by raising taxes or cutting benefits, though this would be a bad deal for younger workers."

Its "Social Security" not "Federal Retirement." The goal should be to keep people from falling off the edge. It seems bizarre to me that libertarians would argue that the nanny state should help them plan for their retirement.

RE: Social Security Reform Now