From: Keith Henson (hkhenson@rogers.com)
Date: Sat 06 Mar 2004 - 00:00:49 GMT
People have griped that there is no definitive research in memetics. To
the extent that's been true in the past it is because of the cost of
collecting meme traces and time stamping where they are. (Look at my
attempts to hunt down the origin of "ideas have a life of their own.") A
high fraction of memes circulate on the nets nowadays, so a researcher with
a good net feed can collect a lot of data in a hurry and with analyzing
tools make sense of it.
Here is the lead in to a report--which incidentally does not use the M words.
Warning: Blogs Can Be Infectious
By Amit Asaravala
The most-read webloggers aren't necessarily the ones with the most original
ideas, say researchers at Hewlett-Packard Labs.
Using newly developed techniques for graphing the flow of information
between blogs, the researchers have discovered that authors of popular blog
sites regularly borrow topics from lesser-known bloggers -- and they often
do so without attribution.
These findings are important to sociologists who are interested in learning
how ideas grow from isolated topics into full-blown epidemics that "infect"
large populations. Such an understanding is also important to marketers,
who hope to be able to pitch products and ideas directly to the most
influential people in a given group.
"There is a lot of speculation that really important people are highly
connected, but really, we wonder if the highly connected people just listen
to the important people," said Lada Adamic, one of the four researchers
working on the project.
http://wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,62537,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1
**********
(paste in whatever below this point you want to comment on)
To properly attribute, "Android Cat" <androidcat99@hotmail.com> (non
working email) called this to my attention on the alt.religion.scientology
news group. He mentioned getting it from:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/05/152244&mode=thread
I looked through a few pages of slashdod before finding memetics connected
to the thread:
"This idea needs to spread like a virus (Score:2)
by WormholeFiend (674934) on Friday March 05, @10:49AM (#8475540) While in
an epidemic it's pretty bad if you are Patient Zero, in the blog memetics
universe, it is good to be Blogger Zero."
Keith Henson
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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