Decius wrote:
Well, its that time of year again. MemeStreams is now handling about twice as much traffic as we where in 2003.
 . . .
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!

Very interesting data, thanks! I knew my own memestream got a lot of traffic here, but not how it stacked up against the other users. I also enjoyed the data on which specific pages are generating the most traffic, like about the "Funny Cat Videos". It's good insight into human nature!

Elonka

RE: Statistics for memestreams.net (2005)

Rattle wrote:
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..

Sounds like a fun program! Sorry I can't be there this year -- I'm preparing for my NSA talk next week. But I look forward to the pictures!

Elonka :)

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

I've been getting an increasing number of hits to my websites via this service, so I finally decided to give it a try to see what's up.

The way it works, is that you signup for free, and then you get a "Stumbleupon" toolbar added to your browser. Any website that you go to, you can give it a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. You can also click on a "comment" button which will let you post your own comment, and/or view what other "stumblers" have said about the site. Sites can be sorted by categories, and you can also just click on the "Stumble" button which will take you randomly to highly-rated sites that are in categories that you are interested in. I played with it a bit, and nearly every site it took me to was an extremely interesting one. I could see myself wasting a *lot* of time with this....

StumbleUpon

At the too-young age of 35, a well-known member of Memestreams, Brad Blines, died of a heroin overdose on January 8th, 2004. This page documents Brad's activity in our virtual community, and shows a fraction of the people whose lives he touched.

R.I.P.

In Memoriam: Brad Blines, aka CrankyMessiah

Here it is folks, the 2003 usage statistics for Memestreams.net!

An order of magnitude growth! Not bad. :)

Statistics of www.memestreams.net for 2003

Here's an interesting resource on the "Four-Pronged Fair Use Test". Evidently there's no clear "this is fair use" vs. "this is plagiarism" litmus test, but instead there are four factors that are taken into consideration, with sort of a sliding scale on each of the four factors. This webpage is good reading, but for a real quick and dirty summary, the four factors are:

 (1) What is the character of the use? (commercial, commentary/criticism, educational, nonprofit, etc.)

 (2) What is the nature of the work to be used? (factual article, fictional story, or a combination, with using somebody's factual reporting more likely to be considered fair use, whereas copying someone's fictional story to be more likely to be considered plagiarism)

 (3) How much of the work will be used? (all of it, or just parts)

 (4) What effect would this use have on the market for the original or for permissions if the use were widespread? (is quoting something going to mean that whoever wrote it makes less money or loses control of their own work?)

So, in terms of Memestreams (and I have to preface this with IANAL: I Am Not A Lawyer):

Mostly good things to do:
- Quote a small amount of text rather than an entire article
- Quote factual articles
- Add your own commentary or thoughts on what you quote
- Always link back or attribute the source

Sometimes bad things to do:
- Quoting large amounts of a webpage
- Quoting someone's original fictional story
- Quoting from inside a "subscription only" site
- Saying words are yours, when instead they're copy/pasted from somewhere else
- Posting just a copy/paste, without any kind of added original commentary

And again, none of the above items are an instant "good" or "bad" determination. They're just recommended guidelines, that are probably worth mentioning in a Memestreams help file somewhere. :)

My $0.02,

Elonka :)

Memestreams and 'Fair Use' Guidelines

What the "Newsisfree.com" site says about their Memestreams feed:

] MemeStreams
]
] The links in this feed are chosen by a flat democracy.
] When a MemeStreams user recommends a link, it is counted
] as a vote for that link to appear on the main page, and
] the page for the topic it was recommended into. This feed
] shows the most popular links

News Is Free: MemeStreams: Information About This Channel

] In systems where many people are free to choose between
] many options, a small subset of the whole will get a
] disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or
] income), even if no members of the system actively work
] towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with
] moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological
] explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely
] enough and freely enough, creates a power law
] distribution.

Very interesting essay on things such as the 80/20 rule, as applied to everything from wealth distribution to the popularity of individual web logs.

Shirky: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality

Decius wrote:
[[Please read and rerecommend. I want this to get as much coverage on the site as possible, and I want feedback. ]]

And Rattle wrote:
[[We want to be good bartenders, so be sure to tell us how our drinks taste. ]]

And my reply is:

Well, I'm not *entirely* sure that I understand what you're asking, but I'll try to give feedback...

(1) I agree that I want privacy concerning what kinds of stuff that I am reading. I don't believe it's anybody's business to know every web page that I surf to on a given day, or which articles I spent time reading thoroughly, and which ones I just skimmed through, or which links I opened up because somebody sent me a funny URL, etc.

(2) In terms of what I recommend, meaning it shows up on my Memestream Page, I see that information as public. If I care enough to recommend a link and say something new about it, I've already accepted that my recommendation, and my comments about that recommendation, are public.

(3) In terms of what I *click* on, I don't believe that that information should be public. I classify that as stuff that I read, which is okay for sysops to know if they really want, but I don't really want it all publicly available to be analyzed and criticized ("Hey, did you see that Elonka went to the yahoo.com search engine 10 times today? What, Google isn't g00d enough for her anymore?")

(3) In terms of which of the existing Memestreams articles that I recommend, and *whose* stuff I recommend, like If I recommend 10 links by person A, 6 links by person B, 3 by C, etc., I don't mind if that information is public, nor do I mind if it's displayed in a quantifiable chart format.

(4) I would like to be able to see the "recommend" tree on an article if I want. Like to display all the different people that recommended a given link, and when, and what they said about that article (or if they recommended it, but didn't say anything new about it).

Decius & Rattle, I hope that answers your questions. If not, please re-ask?

Elonka :)

An important privacy question