Idea
Watching the "If, as you live your life, you find yourself mentally composing blog entries about it…" meme spreading, I find myself with the thought: someone should devise a way of automatically tracking blog-memes and visualizing the results. Between Technorati, del.icio.us, and Bloglines, there ought to be a way to extract the information, no? I’m envisioning something like the TouchGraph Google Browser, part family tree and part network, with some way to show the direction of linking. You could make it display a meme’s progression over time. Then you could figure out the points where different sectors of the blogosphere connect — where the bridges between one interest group and another are.
It sounds a bit trivial (after all, nobody really cares who posted their "Which Tarot Card Are You?" quiz result first*), but I bet you could use it to investigate all kinds of questions about social networks, and degrees of separation, and small world theory, and whether Malcolm Gladwell is right about tipping points and the epidemic model of change.
Of course, someone with much more geek cred than I have has no doubt had this idea already, implemented it, and posted the results months ago. I just haven’t come across it yet. Which shows some of the boundaries of my own online social network. I’m not enough of a geek to jump from the lit-crit / humanities / operaphile sector to the internet-culture / technology / social-software / semantic-web sector. Not yet, anyway. (But I did re-locate the Google Browser project site after completely forgetting where I’d originally seen it, and I did so via a combination of hitting a few likely blogs and guessing at del.icio.us tags, which says something in itself about the usefulness of such networks for locating information even if you’re only peripherally connected to them, and I should really close this parenthesis now.)
Thoughts?
* I’m still the Hermit, last I checked. Time to look into getting a vial of Hermit perfume from BPAL.
One of the my fellow grad students was teaching an undergrad course in the honors college for hypertext next semester, focusing on how texts in cyberspace shift dependent upon the user. I confess that much of his ideas were quite beyond me, and I think beyond most of our profs in the English Dept. but I’ve no doubt it will be an interesting course for those UGs.
When I first read this, I was struck with — ah, the equivalent of the OED for online communication. Wouldn’t it be so masterful if such a tool existed?
My colleague Laura is very interested in these issues, and she writes a bit about online social networking on her current professional blog: http://www.brynmawr.edu/etc/etcblog/
She also recommends looking at examples at http://blogpulse.com/ and doing a search on Technorati.
Nice to see you here, Christa!
I too would love to see something that showed the graphic spread of memes through blogspace.
The closest I’ve seen is the way that Blogstreet will generate these fascinating interconnected webs between affiliated blogs, but that’s not quite the same.
I do remember a while ago participating in a meme that tracked, in real time, how many people up or downstream of your post were adding that meme to their own blogs, but I don’t know if anything ever came of it.