Meme tracking

December 4, 2006 4:32 AM

Is it science? Or just link whoring? "Measuring the speed of spread of a meme across the internet." (Does Metafilter count as a "high traffic site" for his purposes?)
posted by Steven C. Den Beste (8 comments total)

er, no.
posted by clevershark at 4:39 AM on December 4, 2006

Wouldn't it be just as good to measure this in memes that have already been around? Maybe even better!
posted by thirteenkiller at 4:41 AM on December 4, 2006

Significantly better to study older memes, I'd say. More like link whoring in my book.
posted by Hildegarde at 5:02 AM on December 4, 2006

a single voice can travel from one side of the internet to the other

Meh. Talk about over-extending a metaphor.

There's no property analogous to "speed" here because what you're trying to track is the growth of a tree, not the movement of a single point.

And good luck tracking that without a formal <via> mechanism.
posted by Leon at 6:05 AM on December 4, 2006

See Scott McLemee's roundup at Crooked Timber.

(Disclaimer: I know both the Scotts in question.)
posted by thomas j wise at 6:21 AM on December 4, 2006

Stupid.
posted by delmoi at 8:04 AM on December 4, 2006

Wired has an excellent analysis of this (largely pointless) phenomenon.
posted by O9scar at 9:18 AM on December 4, 2006

Literature graduate students, meet my good friend, network theory.

Kind of amusing that an ancient meme (the old meme-about-meme-growth-theory-meta-meme) still has a little life left in it. I wonders how many other bloggers have tried and failed at this over the years - now that would be a little bit interesting, comparing the success and failure of various nodes at re-igniting tired old memes.
posted by MetaMonkey at 3:23 PM on December 4, 2006