For each week of 2004, we provide a graph of that week's social network activity, the most popular discussions, and the most popular users. Every link between people in the graphs represents at least one blog entry that was read and re-recommended; hence propagated further through the network. The arrows point to sources; they represent the flow of reputation. The users in each graph are those whose memes were re-recommended in the preceding two weeks. Users are colored depending on their popularity that week, with the highest scores getting the brightest colors. Links are only mapped for memes posted on a user's MemeStream. Replies in threads are not graphed.

MemeStreams - Year in Graphs 2004

] 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

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

Decius wrote:
] I forgot to mention that we also have .org, although it points
] somewhere else....

Proactive or facetious? You^H^H^HThe lawers decide.

Introducing: The MemeStreams Defense Fund (memestreams.org)

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

Memestreams.net 'Its dot com!'

I spent the last week in an insane asylum. Previous to being checked in, I had gone about five days without sleep. That's on the heels of another visit to the nut house I took down in Atlanta on Saturday at Interz0ne. Ladies and gentlemen, I have found the edge, and it sucks from here. I'm coming back now before I fall right off.

As usual, condolences go out to all the people whom I'm scare along the way. This may also be a good time to say, if for some reason I croak in one of my "manic" phases, there is a MemeStreams curse. It will be called the "Messiah Rattle" curse. Its on all the "top users" on the system below the very top Two. Its a binary thing. The system has tasted blood and grey matter, and it will only want more. Tom and Jeremy, you better watch your asses and keep recommending good content. Everyone else is just fucked. You must somehow survive among the mist of popularity. (At the time I typed "popularity", I think I heard Tom laugh all the way in Atlanta..) And don't worry about me, its kinda like Lain. Its neat "over there".. heh heh heh Seriously though.. I will not hurt myself. I will not hurt others. Myself, others, all good.. Really. Seriously! Stop laughing.. And don't touch that phone.

Seriously though.. Really. I reserve the right to make sick and twisted jokes in the face of mental illness. I have a massive email backlog right now, and several long rants I need to post of stuff I intended to talk about at Interz0ne related to MemeStreams. I had failing visual aids, insanity (mine and others), alcohol (mine and others), and a complete lack of marijuana, all working against me. There are several people who have expressed interest in working on the project with us, and this is good. As I have done a good job of proving, while I may be very good at coming up with ideas, I have the tendency to go off the (very) deep end every so often and wind up in a mental hospital.

Such is life. A project/service of any worth must be able to deal with these problems in order to scale. I am going to give myself a day or two of mental recovery before fully re-engaging, but I hope to have at the very least a list of serious tasks that must be done in order to get things moving along. I'll be sending various people some email's soon. If you were someone I spoke to at Interz0ne about the project, email me just so I have your contact information on record.

[U: One thing I care to be clear about. s/insane/crazy/ .. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I am clearly crazy, because I choose to do things in ways that are well, a little farther over the edge then most. I'll behave better. ]

This is a copy of the MemeStreams logo in the correct size for being set as the background on a Nokia 3650 mobile phone.

MemeStreams logo for Nokia 3650

irc.freenode.net:#meme .. I appear to be the only person who is ever in there other then bucy, who drops in occasionally. We announced it awhile back, a few people started to idle in there, no one was ever alive at the same time, then it just died..

Take two?

Decius wrote:
] 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.

You left out the single most important word, the one that explains everything: Javascript.

RE: MemeStreams broken in IE!!

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