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

] a conversation between Clay Shirky, Stewart "Flickr" Butterfield,
] Joshua "Delicious" Schachter and Jimmy "Wikipedia" Wales at the
] O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego. Folksonomy
] is the process of letting users generate and apply their own tags
] to shared items and then discovering which tegs users share with
] one another. Unlike previous ventures into this field, the tags
] aren't "controlled"

What are people's thoughts about replacing the topics system in MemeStreams with a folksonomy like Del.icio.us?

Folksonomy conversation

These are histograms of the timestamps for all entries posted to three MemeStreams:

Jeremy, from the first post on October 8, 2001 through the post previous to this one on March 12, 2005;

Decius, from the first post on September 5, 2001 through the latest post on March 11, 2005; and

Rattle, from the first post on September 8, 2001 through the latest post on March 8, 2005.

You'll notice significant differences among the three graphs.

The X axis shows time of day (in Pacific time). Each day of the week is shown in a different row and color along the Y axis. The height of each bar in the Z axis represents the cumulative number of posts bearing a timestamp of the corresponding day and time.

Meme Maps for 'Jeremy', 'Decius', and 'Rattle', September 2001 - March 2005