The spam is getting really annoying. I've implemented rel=nofollow for people with low global reputations as well as a couple other subtle tweeks. Hopefully these people are smart enough to know when they are wasting their time. I'll make more changes if they are not.

] A few weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, an FBI
] agent called the Whitney Museum of American Art and asked
] to see a drawing on exhibit there. The piece was by Mark
] Lombardi, an artist who had committed suicide the year
] before. Using just a pencil and a huge sheet of paper,
] Lombardi had created an intricate pattern of curves and
] arcs to illustrate the links between global finance and
] international terrorism.

Something to listen to while you look through the year in graphs.

NPR : The 'Conspiracy' Art of Mark Lombardi

] 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

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

Since 2002 we've been publishing the httpd log statistics for this site on an annual basis. This gives you some insight into traffic levels, popular pages, and the kinds of search results that bring people to MemeStreams.

From the time we went online (in the fall of 2001) until September of 2003 we saw a fairly constant growth in the number of unique visitors using this site. This year that pattern has changed. The growth, as measured in terms of unique visitors, seems to have leveled off shy of 30,000 people a month, and this year we settled into a static pattern typical of older websites, where more traffic is received in the winter months than in the summer months. As our site is current events focused we also get an occasional boost from popular news stories.

However, while the same number of people are using MemeStreams as were using it a year ago, those people seem to be using it a lot more. In September of 2003 we got 27,825 unique visitors, who visited 101,041 pages on the site. In November of 2004 we got 27,496 unique visitors, but they visited 155,421 pages on the site.

Truth be told, this is probably a more significant change. A lot of those 27 thousand people wash in from a search engine looking for something specific and never return. The vitality of this site is more dependent on the people who stick around a while and actually make use of it. Those people seem to be growing in numbers even as the overall total remains the same.

The main page of the site was hit 259,011 times this year, which works out to about 708 times a day. Thats up from 148,826 last year (which is 408 times a day). Also, in 2003 29% of our traffic came from search engines and 33% came from bookmarks. This year 19% came from search engines and 57% came from bookmarks.

2003 saw the birth of the referrer spammer and they are not going away. The 5 "links from an external page" listed here were the only ones that made the top 20 who I'm absolutely sure aren't spammers. (Honestly, the Netnewswire link may be considered spam, as it is offered by that RSS reader, but its somewhat interesting data and not exactly the same thing as robots that hit your site over and over with no interest in fetching the content.)

If you're interested, you can find the links to older annual statistics here:
http://www.memestreams.net/allabout.html

Happy New Year!

2004 Statistics for www.memestreams.net

Memestreams.com now points to Memestreams.net... and there was much rejoicing!

Memestreams.net 'Its dot com!'

Well, here is my show cohosting BinRev Radio with StankDawg. I need to work on being more precise when I'm talking on the air. However, some interesting aspects of Memetics and Memestreams were discussed and I think it came together well in the end. If you'd like to know more about what memes are and how they work, have listen!

Decius & Memestreams on BinRev Radio [MP3]

One of the frustrating things about running a site like this is that people rarely tell you if there is a problem with the site. Particularly new users.

It turns out that the MemeStreams Bookmarklet has not worked in IE since I made the changes needed to support Safari back in July. No one told me about it until yesterday. The bookmarklet has now been repaired. If you know anyone who had trouble with this in IE during the past few months, please let them know that the bookmarklet has been updated. They can reinstall it and it will work fine.

Thank you Apple for not only creating a third way to call document getselection, but also doing it in a way that sends Microsoft browsers into lala land. You truly suck.

MemeStreams broken in IE!!

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