Comments on: Meme tracking

Meme tracking

Steven C. Den Beste — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 04:32:39 -0800

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?)

By: clevershark

clevershark — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 04:39:20 -0800

er, no.

By: thirteenkiller

thirteenkiller — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 04:41:37 -0800

Wouldn't it be just as good to measure this in memes that have already been around? Maybe even better!

By: Hildegarde

Hildegarde — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 05:02:16 -0800

Significantly better to study older memes, I'd say. More like link whoring in my book.

By: Leon

Leon — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 06:05:42 -0800

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.

By: thomas j wise

thomas j wise — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 06:21:44 -0800

See Scott McLemee's roundup at Crooked Timber. (Disclaimer: I know both the Scotts in question.)

By: delmoi

delmoi — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 08:04:03 -0800

Stupid.

By: O9scar

O9scar — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 09:18:41 -0800

Wired has an excellent analysis of this (largely pointless) phenomenon.

By: MetaMonkey

MetaMonkey — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 15:23:20 -0800

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.