As promised, I have an update of the statistics regarding our traffic increase following the start of the war.

On the 21th, I posted saying we were seeing a 66% increase in traffic in the period after the 17th. At the time I noted that this was not a very accurate statistic because weekends tend to be light on traffic, which would slant the statistic on the high side.. Now that its been a full week, I can report more accurately what the "war impact" on site traffic has been.

The 17th thru 20th were all really busy days.. Each one a record setter, which spawned the initial 66% increase stat. For the sake of further refinement, that was a 34% increase over the same time period for the week before.. The 66% figure took into account the same span of time immediately before, which was the weekend, when traffic slacks.. In hindsight, that was a really misleading statistic. And to make matters worse, I didn't catch a critical typo in my inital post, causing a figure of 166% to make it to the front page, which in turn caused me to feel like an idiot.. Anyway.. There was a slight falloff in traffic on Friday the 21th, and the 22nd and 23rd were light as expected, but all three days were still higher then normal.

In short, visits are up:

* 31% for the week following the 17th
* 34% for the inital 4 days following the 17th

The navigation menu on the left side of the page no longer hides the link for the page you are on. The Agent and Search Engine now have a more intelligent pager.

As always, let Decius or I know if you run into any bugs.

] 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!

leed25d wrote:
] Wed Mar 5 14:14:31 PST 2003
]
] I would like to point out that an article about the
] Radebaugh exhibit was just published on slashdot.

Its not the first time that a link has gotten well placed within MemeStreams several days before getting picked up by a major weblog. Its happened many times. I was just talking to Decius about this the other day. Glad you all noticed it too. :)

All evidence that the thing we have going on is working. We are still really early in on it though. There are about 20 of us who are frequent posters. We mostly know each other. In many ways, we have one tight-knit group of people, and a bunch of folks starting to file in around the fringes.. The system allows for a mugh higher degree of group seperation then we have right now, even at its present state. I feel I can describe just about everything right now as "young and immature". I mean that in a totally good way too. We have many good things on the way.

We have a massive backlog of features and bug fixes for the site.. Lots of stuff on the back end needs to get worked out before we can give the parts of the site everyone sees and uses the focus they require. Most of the work being done right now by me is on backend stuff that noone really sees..

Its nearly impossible for me to give any kinda accurate estimate about what new stuff is going to hit when. Life is crazy these days. Things have been getting done faster now then any time in the past, but what gets done when is dependent on how today's quest for survival is going. And like any development project, some things go faster then you expect, and you hit things that hold you up. Hence, don't expect a timeline, just expect things to happen. At least for the near future.

As Decius has told me in email and on the phone several times now, I need to be more vocal about whats going on around here. Do things like post when I make a site update and saying whats changed. Basic stuff like that.. Well folks, the truth of the matter is, most of the time after I take the site out of maintaince mode, I'm ususally thinking about one thing and one thing only.. The pillow. I find it shortly thereafter, and the next day I decide that it wasn't that important. Yeah, I know thats lame. I'll be more chatty. I promise.

As said earlier, most of what I'm working on now is backend related. Once I'm finished up with that house cleaning, the code that generates user bios and blogs is going to get my love. Its the oldest code in the system, and it is filled with the scars of changed approaches. It just needs to be hacked up, taking into account a bunch of new capabilities we will have shortly. Things like pictures in bios are going to happen in that process. The focus of much of the work is on scalability and making it easier to add new features and tweak UI.

Also.. Logging, and by extension statistics available, are going to get... [ Read More (0.1k in body) ]

RE: The Impending Death of /. is Predicted

There was a bug in the code that generates the statistics at the bottom of the Social Network graphs. The statistics for Sources (outbound links) were completely wrong.

I'm pretty sure its fixed now.

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. [rattle: "Its time I got back.. Its time I got back.. And I don't even know how I got off the track.." -weezer]

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.

MemeStreams has RSS support!

] 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

Getting that "William Gibson watching Blade Runner" feeling..

Of course, this takes up so much of my machine's CPU that I can't actually nagigate around it sucessfully..

BlogStreet : Visual Neighborhood

] 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

] The basic shape is simple - in any system sorted by rank,
] the value for the Nth position will be 1/N. For whatever
] is being ranked -- income, links, traffic -- the value of
] second place will be half that of first place, and tenth
] place will be one-tenth of first place. (There are other,
] more complex formulae that make the slope more or less
] extreme, but they all relate to this curve.) We've seen
] this shape in many systems. What've we've been lacking,
] until recently, is a theory to go with these observed
] patterns.

This same pattern is present in the MemeStreams community.

Several weeks ago, Decius posted up some of my proof of concept work (http://www.memestreams.net/visual.html) in this area. Since that time, I've been working on code to produce detailed statistics and enable visual navigation of the social network present on MemeStreams. As I'm writing this, I'm flipping over and looking at it, unsure what to say about it. Its cool. You are all going to love it. :) I'll have more to say when its ready to go live on the site. I still have a fair amount of work to do on it.

Shirky: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality