Neomeme

Warning: This is a blog post about this blog. Here is the FAQ for such posts:

Q: Could the blog author get any more narciccistic and self-aggrandizing?

A: Yes. That’s what posts after a Digg front-page story are for.

Now, with that out of the way, the actual post:

Now that this blog has gotten enough incoming links (Thanks Lifehacker and ProBlogger! ), I’m beginning to see organic search traffic, mainly from Google, where neomeme is ranked surprisingly high for certain somewhat competitive search terms. The Google gods smile upon me. But, aside from queries relevant to the content of the blog, this blog is mysteriouslyranked highly for rather…different combinations of words. Certainly not nearly as amusing as the AOL Search Database, but still mildly amusing. And so, recent searches where this blog not only showed up high in search results, but also clicked on the results, hoping to find what they are looking for here. Read more »

If you haven’t noticed, I’ve added a MyBlogLog widget to the right sidebar. So far, I’m extremely happy with it. There’s a good reason many top bloggers use it, and Yahoo recently bought it for a cool $10 mil. So far, I’m liking it. A lot. It adds a whole new dynamic to blogging and, if you excuse the cliche, pushes blogging the rest of the way into Web 2.0. MyBlogLog adds a whole new dimension of interactivity to blogging, because it lets the blogger connect with readers he probably didn’t know he had. Because all readers with MyBlogLog accounts have blogs of their own, a dialogue of comments can commence. Before I started blogging, I did not read any blogs regularly, and, like most Internet users, I restricted blog visits to happenstance Google search results. Now, I have discovered over a half-dozen blogs I frequent, mostly through comments and trackbacks on my own blog, as well as top posts from Wordpress.com. MyBlog Log greatly increases a blogger’s exposure to other bloggers with similar interests,blogging topics, and readers. Over time, MyBlogLog really does foster “community” as familiar faces, all with distinct personalities and opinions reappear each others’ blogs. The potential for MyBlogLog is amazing- I look forward to exploring the novel communites of interesting, real people it spontaneously creates.

I wish I got paid to write this post. But sadly I’m only genuinely enthusiastic,mostly because “celebrity” bloggers have at least briefly glimpsed my blog. Hooray!

There’s been increasing buzz about a potential Google Metaverse. A 3D, virtual world similar to Second Life, but with all the Google goodies. A Google Earth for the Internet, if you will. This is a facinating, if a bit heady, article on the potential design of the Google Metaverse. Its basic point is that 3D navigaition for the Internet will call for us to throw all of our old ideas about navigation and virtual worlds out the window and start anew. The article proposes a hexagonal grid of “homespaces”. Then it gets into Euclidean geometry, and I fall asleep.

Of course, the exciting concept of traversing the Internet or the hard drive in 3D has been paraded around for decades, and has recently gained new life with technologies such as Project Looking Glass. See this[PDF link] IEEE paper for an overview of some early attempts at 3D navigation. Virtual worlds where one “travels”, Second Life being the most prominent example, are growing at explosive rates. But the fact remains that nobody has succesfully managed to create a 3D environment for what is essentially a 2D structure. When we navigate the Internet or a file hierarchy, we always progress linearly, clicking “deeper” from one link to the next. There is never any true movement in three dimensions, and there has never been any true need, beyond the “cool” factor, to do so. Imagine having to run through a dungeon and shooting through a wave of monsters every time you want to delete some files. Yes, this has been done. Fun at first, but horribly inefficient.

A more likely virtual world is one the Business 2.0 article suggests- moving avatars added into Google Earth. With the acquisition of 3D modeling software SketchUp, Google has already populated Google Earth with realistic 3D models of many buildings. Add street-level photographs, contributed by users(like now-defunct A9 maps tried to do), and you have an accurate virtual representation of the world. Realistic virtual tourism certainly seems more plausible.

One thing is certain: If anyone can make 3D worlds easy to use and push them into the mainstream, it’s Google.

An intrepid user of social news networks Digg and reddit decided to try a little experiment: He posted a story to both sites and counted referrers to see how many people came from each site, thus deciding once and for all which site drives more traffic. The results are unsurprising- reddit leads Digg by an order of magnitude. I see the same thing in referrers for my blog, and I’m sure other bloggers see similar results. Time and time again, with a post submitted to Digg and reddit simultaneously, especially one that does not make the front page of either site, reddit results in two to three times more clicks.

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Web Worker Daily has an interesting post about how new web services like Amazon S3 are redefining the web development landscape by providing easy-to-use, commoditized web services. Web Worker Daily hails this as a step towards a sunny future where ” a non-programmer with a regular-sized wallet can come up with an idea for a web-based business and put it together himself from pieces available on the web.” Fuck. Can you imagine the cesspool of shit the Web will become if every average Joe thinks himself a web developer? We will be overrun by hundreds, nay thousands of inferior clones, buggy applications and poorly executed concepts. Just look at all of the many hundreds of Digg clones out there. Do 99% of them contribute anything to the Internet community? Do they create any value for users? No, they don’t. We have already glimpsed the sheer horror(warning:don’t click if you have epilepsy) that Myspace created when it convinced average web surfers they were qualified to be web designers. Now imagine, if your mind can handle it, a thousand Gmails, a thousand Wordpresses, a thousand Flickrs, most with that same awful design not only on the frontend but also on the backend. An email service that loses all of your emails because the creator, an average Joe who is completely unfamiliar with the principles of good programming, forgot to drag in the “Backup” widget. Or a web service with broken links not in HTML, as many poorly coded, typo-ridden websites have now, but in relational databases. Read more »

Today we answer the question that has puzzled philosophers for millennia. What, exactly, is a human life? Don’t worry, we’ll tie this one up in a neat little bundle. After all, we have blogs and the Internet on our side. Here we go, with two websites I happened to randomly stumble upon in the same day(synchronicity?):

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Explaining the name of this blog(in response to multiple questions), and also stumbling upon its purpose. Not bad:

I came across this lengthy yet fascinating post about memes today. It’s very well-researched and thought provoking, and definitely worth a read. Coincidentally, the same day I completed Metal Gear Solid 2, which adresses much of the same topics and came across this in-depth analysis of its multilayered ending. The concept of the Internet meme, as the term is used in this blog, is nothing new. Even Scoble has written about memes. A meme, as used here, is simply a single intangible unit of information. Digital technology redefines memes because anyone can create and distribute one with unprecendeted ease.

Armed with all of this reading, I have finally come up with a single summary, a mission statement for this blog: The purpose of this blog is to explore the new kinds of memes the Internet and other emerging technologies create, and how they morph and travel in an increasingly social digital world.
The idea will be approached. Occasionally, unrelated content will slip in- this is my only blog, after all. But, overall, whether it’s instructions how to create a single piece of digital information(a password) or game a memetracker(digg), future posts will lie at least somewhat tangent to that topic, looking in at it through the lenses of tech, philosohy, psychology or, my favorite, social experiment. Quite a few interesting ideas I have yet to commit to (digital) paper, so stay tuned.

Lifehacker rightly calls this a “philoso-tech” blog, which was indeed my original intent for it. So far, it’s been leaning heavily towards the tech side, but we’ll throw in some philo/psych stuff soon, I promise. Here’s something from the philosophy side I wrote a while ago, in my Guild Wars days, but never published, now linkified, updated, and presented here:

Films like The Matrix or Vanilla Sky construct haunting futures of humans trapped
in virtual worlds they believe to be real. Critics of technological advances point to such dystopian futures as cautionary tales against letting technology run rampant and see it overtaking humanity. Critics of those critics point out that no matter how hard scientists try, they have been unable to create an AI that consistently passes the Turing test. If a machine can’t even maintain conversation, they reason, how could it dominate all of humanity? But do we really have to wait until an artificial intelligence passes the Turing Test? Or are machines that are far more capable already among us?

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No, this isn’t becoming a personal blog. But I am playing along with Engtech’s blogging contest. Not so much for the potential lure of random selection for WordPress credits, but more to explore the general issue of “Why People Blog”, which will probably surface in a future post(my bet’s on the next one). I assume that “Why People Blog” has been beaten to death by bloggers everywhere, but I will stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that fact by not reading any of them. Anyhow, why I blog:

I blog to capture the moments between wakefulness and sleep. I have always had ideas lying in bed, trying to fall asleep, because, in the twilight moments of the mind, what can you do but think? I would bolt out of bed, grab a pen and scribble furiously on tiny post-its, because that’s all I have readily available at my desk. At first, the ideas were random, stories, poems, DaVincian contraptions and bizarre insects, journeys in brain crevices. But, for the past couple years, undoubtedly influenced by my reading(I devour tech blogs voraciously), my half-asleep ideas became more focused, more polished. Now, they are plans for startups, tech ideas, analysis of social networks, tech memes and the blogosphere, hacks and gadgets, etc. The tech I read about every day has infused my sleepy moments to such a degree that they have become inseparable. Before writing any post(yes, including this one), I ask myself: Is this something I would want to read? Would I be interested in reading this if I stumbled across it as I do on hundreds of blog posts daily? A lot of the time, the answer is no. And so, every night, in my final hours of wakefulness, thoughts race like bullet trains through my head and linger in my dreams. A few of these thoughts make it onto these pages, because, if they are not fleshed out and developed somewhere, they will dissapear forever. As for the rest of them- every night, as my mind resists sleep, a few more crumpled Post-Its join the bizarre anthill of discarded ideas that so relentlessly draws my daily final thoughts.

For the record, I spent about 10 minutes writing that last sentence and I still hate it.

Okay maybe this blog is getting a little meta. Blogging about blogging ,which engtech rightly compares to masturbation. After all, this blog is largely about the Internet and the new ways in which units of information spread. New units of information, traveling in novel ways. Neomemes, if you will.

Now for a little game, something completely useless:

I’ve come across a lot of cool blogs in the past few weeks of my introduction to blogging. In particular, I’ve been struck by how creative and cool-sounding their names were. In true Dave Barry fashion I thought “this would be a good name for a rock band”. So good in fact, that it’s sometimes hard to tell what’s a band and what’s a blog. Thus, a little low-tech quiz- Blog or Band. If you want to, play along. If I have linked to your blog from here, or if you have a blog and are reading this, feel free to put a similar game on your own blog with a few blogs you think have cool names.

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