A while back, I posted an idea for checking to see the degree to which two differently named memes overlap in content. Looking back, what I was really talking about was tuning a folksonomy. What we really want is a way to see how much overlap there is between two tags so that we can […]
memes
WordPress Related Entries plugin
A while back I hinted to the hackers in the crowd that I would love to have a tool for aggregating the posts related to a particular meme on my site. Well, it looks like somebody did it. Unfortunately, it was for the wrong blog tool. D’Arcy Norman called my attention to this WordPress plug-in […]
Tracking Memes in the Wild, Part III
In my last two posts, I wrote about the limitations of one method for tracking memes and the promise of second method. That latter method, in brief, was to tag each meme-containing post with a unique text string that could enable you to use a search engine as an aggregator. But how can this be […]
Tracking Memes in the Wild, Part II
In my last post I talked about a meme tracking experiment and bemoaned the fact that it provided no way to track arbitrary memes in the wild. Luckily, an e-Literate reader put me on the track to a workable idea in his comment on a previous post. Martin Terre Blanche points us to a post […]
Tracking Memes in the Wild, Part I
The other day, I ran into this post on the Contentious weblog which, in turn, led me to this longer post about an experiment conducted by a PhD student. Basically, he created a survey that he asked people to fill out, post to their blogs, and then pass on, like chain email. He wanted to […]
Idea Viruses as Informational Cascades
In a previous post, I suggested that so-called “idea viruses” might be thought of as either causes of or manifestations of informational cascades. I now think manifestation is the right characterization rather than cause. I am persuaded by this fascinating and frightening piece of research [PDF] showing that legislators tend to try to garner support […]
Book Recommendation: The Selfish Gene
It may seem odd, given the focus of this blog, to recommend a book on evolutionary biology. But Richard Dawkins’ book The Selfish Gene lays a solid foundation for helping to understand developments in the aggregation sciences. Dawkins’ main thesis is that evolution is driven by the survival of the fittest genes, not organisms and […]