Internet and Memes August 20, 2007
Posted by Brian in crowdsourcing, memes.add a comment
Here’s an interesting read that tries to break apart memes.
Some basics from it:
- Because the Internet is made for communication, it becomes a perfect way to store, carry, create, link, remember and replicate memes.
- There are memes in many layers of the Internet:
- The operational level (the physical network and the routing that takes place there): anything that is an information pattern is essentially a meme. The Internet uses special pieces of information to decide the best way to send something with the state of the ‘net. If a network is down over which information would have been sent, the information has to go another way to its destination.
- The service level (websites / bots / programs): Google is a meme because it holds a tremendous amount of information patterns. It looks at what people mean by a given phrase and knows that they mean site A, not site B, even though they both have the same word in it. Site A is catchier than the other. Services have to work together, thus creating “memeplexes”. These memes have to work together to do their own tasks, but they also work with other memes to solve theirs. Interestingly, they end up modifying each other to do tasks more efficiently: instead of each one queuing their own tasks to do, they can work together to gather the information all of them need with fewer resources.
- The user level: the Internet is only a supplemental way to transmit memes. It can transmit memes differently because of the medium. The rapidity of memes’ spreading makes for a homogeneous world culture. Some memes are worth more, and it’s usually the ones with less long-term value.
Memetics, August 8, 2007
Posted by Brian in memes.1 comment so far
I learned about the Long Tail a while back, but the context of the project helped me better understand it. The Long Tail is basically the idea that a fairly large–even majority–percentage of the market of a product or company will be made of niches. Amazon sells so many obscure items, and this can, collectively, beat out the popular items’ sales. When cost for storage and shipping (be it physical or digital) goes down, companies can have more less popular items, thus increasing their demographic reach. Just a bit of a primer for the second tidbit on the following list. Links for more info are embedded.
(A – from One Degree) Viral Marketing tips for memes:
- A few popular sites can spread infections rapidly – Those 40,000 visitors all originated with six email messages and a post on my personal site. Do your research, pick the most relevant and popular sites, and start with them.
- The ‘long tail’ matters – Only 16% of all visitors came directly from one of those four originating sites. The vast majority of traffic came from over 500 additional, less-popular sites and other sources. A meme builds your web presence one visitor at a time. [Read the Long Tail articles! The blog if you're really into it.]
- We can’t penetrate Internet dark matter – I use the term ‘dark matter’ to refer to alternative, unmeasurable paths to the site. Many visitors, for example, transmitted and received the meme through email. Others used online chat clients like MSN or Yahoo Messenger. Ensure your meme is easily explained for these communicators.
- Social bookmarking matters, sometimes – Memes are often tracked on popular social bookmarking sites. The site that referred the most visitors? StumbleUpon, a venerable website that helps users make discoveries online. On the other hand, only about 300 visitors came from the Web’s most popular site of this type, digg.com. That’s because the site never made the front page of digg.com, the result of which sees several hundreds of thousands of visitors to a site, often crashing it with the so-called ‘digg effect’. Don’t ignore the social bookmarking sites, but don’t obsess over them either.
- Be multilingual – If you have a global audience (and you probably do), try to build memes which either transcend language, or are available in popular languages. At least 20% of the visitors to iCryptex.com came from a non-English website. When done right, memes can dramatically increase a company’s online visibility. The web’s particularly characteristics – its permanance and its one-to-many publishing model – make it a veritable hot tub for viral ideas.
I keep running across the Pareto principle, which states that 80% of, say, business, comes from 20% of customers.
I’ll try to do some research into sites’ usages regarding all of this.
Crowdsouring, Journalism, Memes August 7, 2007
Posted by Brian in crowdsourcing, memes, participatory journalism.3 comments
This is partly a comment on some of the posts so far, partly a random spurt of thoughts.
I thought about it today, after having read the Wired article, and I realized that humans have been crowdsourcing and making mash-ups for … eons. Now it just happens to have a more relevant label.
When people take polls, they’re sourcing the crowd for information. When there is a demand for a product, a company has created something that, according to hoi polloi, is very good. When people vote for a leader–crowdsourcing!
What has happened to journalism? I believe that certain methods work for certain times; certain methods become the proper ways to crowdsource for a given context. Considering that the context changes, it should have changed with it. But it did not. When did it stop being the way to do things?
Something highly related to crowdsourcing is a meme (pronounced “meem”). Richard Dawkins coined the phrase in the ’80s, but it didn’t become popular until fairly recently. Easy examples of memes are lolcats, Star Wars Kid and new kid on the block Chocolate Rain. I said easy in the sense that these are what are commonly referred to as memes. In fact, the word “meme” is itself a meme in two senses: the term is now quickly applied to any viral idea; but cognitively, it expresses verbally a concept that humans are trying to extract from their thoughts in as best a way possible. Language does its best to describe the ideas floating between our synapses, to make them as clear to the people surrounding us. We eventually agree upon certain vocalizations of these floating ideas, and not only do we have words, but we have crowdsourcing and memes rolled into one tight space.
Fancy.
We need to create the most lucid substantiation of something floating in people’s minds.
I’m going to look at memetics from now on, in addition to crowdsourcing. They’re too close to be researched separately.
