] 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

] Searching for sudden "bursts" in the usage of particular
] words could be used to rapidly identify new trends and
] sort information more efficiently, says a US computer
] scientist.

Finding emerging fads in blog data

You've probably noticed that the look of the site is dramatically different. My goal with this is to make the site a little easier on the eyes.

The biggest change in this release is the Social Network Maping. If you click on the Social Network links around the site you'll be able to see who is linking who. The maps are interactive; you can move through the network from link to link by clicking on people's names.

This data is all based on Recommendations (not clickthroughs). It provides an excellent way to get feedback about the links you are providing. As the community is small, most people are connected to a small group of frequent posters. However, as the site grows, this feature should provide an interesting way to surf through the social network on the site in search of interesting people. Rattle deserves all of the credit for this feature.

The MemeBox has been updated. The frames version was a little cramped. This should be more comfortable to use.

New users will not show up in the recent posters list until they've recommend an article. I also fixed a bug with selecting multiple paragraphs of text with the bookmarklet.